Spill Damage :(

So, basically I was being a clumsy idiot and I spilled some chicken noodle soup broth on my precious inspiron 1520 while I was using it.

Before I managed to shut it off, it started playing audio through the speakers as opposed to the headphones I had plugged in, but otherwise it was still running when I powered it down.

I took out the battery, unplugged everything, and held it upside down and let the liquid all drain out.

After it was done draining I let it sit for about an hour and then completely disassembled it, removed the heatsinks, fan, drives, cards, etc... and except for the area where the media buttons were, almost everything was dry, even the things directly below the keyboard, the area around the audio jack, and in the area the liquid drained from.

So I wiped everything off that I could and used liberal amounts of compressed air to try and clean everything out, and also cleaned up a lot of dust from 2.5 years of use.

I rinsed out the keyboard separately with warm water and painstakingly shook out all the droplets I could since I figured that would take the longest to dry.

So I left it disassembled and went to bed while it dried, and then in the morning I put everything back together (about 11 hours since the spill) and tried powering it on since on close inspection of every little component seemed bone dry, and well I was being foolishly optimistic and hoping it would work.

It starts booting, gets to the windows login screen, and then immediately powers down.

How long should I wait before trying again? My battery was on its last breaths and couldn't even hold a charge for 15 minutes, could the battery have completely gone out and even though it was plugged in that could have caused it to power down (I have a new one on the way already)? Am I probably going to have to replace the motherboard if it's dead?

 

be more liberal with the drying, unless you have a desecator leave it for 24 or 48 hours, you can't dry it too much, but you can power it back up too soon.

Anyways, you said that you removed the heatsink and all, this kind of sounds like your laptop is overheating and shuting down.

Did you properly reattach the heatsink to the CPU?
1. Clean off the thermal paste
2. Make it shine again (no lint, nothing)
3. Apply thermal paste and reattach the heatsink.

Same for the GPU

 

this happened to my stepmother's dell not even 15 minutes ago. except with diet soda. its sitting face down unplugged and battery removed drying right now.

it doesnt sound like the soup is causing it to shut down. i agree with gothed that it sounds like the heatsinks are not set properly with a new thin layer of thermal paste.

 

Well, I disassembled and cleaned it out again, replaced the stock thermal paste on the CPU (I couldn't get the GPU heatsink off because it needs like a torx 8 bit but that wouldn't be what overheated anyways) and am just letting it sit for a while before I put it back together and try again.

At least I haven't stripped any of the screws yet. (this is not the first time I've disassembled it)

[EDIT]

Bah, now it powers on, but nothing shows up on the display. I tried reseating the video card and reseating the display connectors but no luck. Bah. I'll have to take it to a friends house to try an external monitor, but if it's not the display then what can I do to tell if it is the video card or the motherboard that is the problem?

 

avoid eating and/or drinking near ur machine

 

Take it apart again, re-seat everything.
Leave the CMOS battery out for a while.

When you put it back together (before you put the battery and power cord back in) hold the power button for 1min.

Then try to boot again, just try to get into the BIOS.

Try it with 1 stick of ram and only on AC power (without the battery in).