A few drops of water - destroyed trackpad?

Hello:

I've had a 2010 MCB (warranty expired last month):

1. Water on my trackpad:

Today I wiped my keyboard and trackpad with a moistured cloth/paper.
After restarting the computer, my trackpad (cursor) suddenly started acting up. I've seen this issue before on Lenovo when a friend spilled water over his keyboard.

I figured that somehow one or two drops must somehow gotten into the trackpad. I took out the battery, wiped everything around. There was no visible residue of water or a problem as far as I could tell.
Anyhow I used hair fan to dry the area and then put it for 3 hours (open without the battery) under hot flowing air from an aircon.

Screwed everything together after a few hours. First two minutes, everything was fine, then the trackpad started acting up again. Now sometimes it's fine(worked 2 hours without any issues, perfectly responsive), other times it doesn't work - like now when I got up and tried to use the computer again.

What else can be done? The amount of water was truly miniscule. Where I should look to clean it? What else to do?
I've tried to browse older threads and some people said this should take care of itself after a while..I don't understand how though. If there is some water residue somwhere on the contacts, how would it fix itself?

I am now using external mouse while with trackpad turned off.

2. Failed ATH hard ware test from CD

I tired to run the ATH test, stopped at 4.33min, got stuck. I could click on "stop test" button and move the cursor, but no response. Had to abort with shut down. Didn't attempt again.
btw. the trackpad acted up also in this "mode"..ie. excluding the possibility that it's a software issue.


Please help - i.e. tell me how to clean this thing.

Christina

 

Well, I suppose that you could possibly try to clean the trackpad area with rubbing alcohol (70% to 90%, though higher is better). The water may be dried up, but the minerals that were in the water are left on the motherboard, trackpad area, wherever the water was, and this might be causing your problems.

 

check around the sides... clean very very good at the very edges around where the metal is... I had something similar happen and used a piece of paper around the edges to make sure nothing got down in there (even if its not big enough to see) and got a trackpad fixed just doing that before... one that is still working fine a year after almost the same thing happened.

 

the trackpad gets its input from electrical properties of your finger. Water conducts electricity, so even a small amount of water on the trackpad will cause it to behave erratically, but shouldn't cause damage. Just remove all of the water from the trackpad and operation should return to normal.

 

A damp cloth should not affect the track pad at all.
A soaked cloth is another story.
Are you sure you dont have some thin film over the trackpad or something?
Have you tried cleaning it again?

I have literally cleaned my trackpad a hundred times easely.
I have a bit of bacteria fobia. So i clean my keyboard and trackpad at least once a week with a damp cloth.
And ive never had any issues.