Spill number two

Sat down this morning for a bit of Metro 2033 on my gaming desktop, the M11x sitting to the side, and managed to knock over my coffee...

...right into my M11x's keyboard.

So I proceeded to try turning the unit off. Nothing was responsive, including a forced power button shutoff. I unplugged the power adapter and thing shut off on it's own. So I'm sitting there looking at the pooled coffee all over the keyboard and I'm pretty calm since I've done this before. Yeah.

I tear it all down, clean the internals with alcohol, rinse the keyboard in water, dig out the hair dryer we have (that hasn't been used in probably 15 years at least) and get everything cleaned up. Slap it all back together and turn it on without the AC adapter plugged in. At post it says that the battery is critically low, yet the battery's charge indicator on the bottom shows that it has 3 lights. I plug in the AC adapter and boot into Windows. Everything looks great other than the system isn't seeing the battery.

Looks like I'll be calling to have my motherboard replaced.

 

Or.... Time to give up coffee That sucks man
Good luck on the replacement.

 

Sucks man. I am guessing your warranty hasn't expired yet? Hopeefully?

 

Few more observations and some good news!

SiSoft Sandra sees the battery - Alienware Li-Ion manufactured in Jan 2009.

BatteryBar shows that it's charging, but but has zero capacity.

In the time that I've had it plugged in it's gone from 3 of 5 to 4 of 5 LEDs on the battery's charge indicator.

In other words everything looks like it's working, except that it's not providing power to the system. Rather strange all said.

So I unplugged the battery and did a full power drain by holding the power button down for 60 seconds. Reconnected it and still no love. Damn...

Next, as a last ditch effort to figure this out on my own, I re-flashed the BIOS thinking that perhaps it might be corrupted. I really didn't think this would matter either. But it DID!

Back. In. The. Saddle!

 

Nice... All fixed for the holidays!

 

Your avatar is fitting.

Good to hear you got it running again.

 

Drinking, Christmas and M11x don't seem to go together.

Top marks for recovering an M11x.

Re-flashing the BIOS is good to know.

My Coffee spill resulted in no more than the keyboard tray 'drizzled' in fluid, which a quick dismantle and clean fixed up a treat.

@idlehand - Give up coffee??? Opps, I neally spilt my brew in shock at reading that.

 

Keyboard cover!

 

Wooohooo! I have no idea how reflashing the bios fixed it but that is awesome that it did!

Happy Holidays!