This is really bad!

This is a hypothetical situation. Someone who is made up received a new e1705 10 days ago and spilled a full beer (in a glass not a can) directly onto the keyboard of the system. The idiot (who spilled the beer) took the system apart and blew dried it with a hair dryer (on cold) to no avail. Of cource mother board is done for (7900gs was highly flash overclocked too), so they call Dell and report this wierd problem of the comp turning on for like 2 seconds then going off everytime. So Dell makes them go through some hoops and try to diagonse the problem. They figure out it is the mother board too and are going to send out a tech to put in a new mother board. Dell thinks the e1705 just shorted out or something, the person who is so stupid as to have spilled beer on his/her laptop did not inform them this is what happened. Will the tech come out and put in a new mb and leave or is he going to be all Sherlock Holmes and figure out "Hey someone spilled beer on this thing!"...?

Answers, comments on this fictional tale appr.

 

Does it smell like beer? If it does that will be a dead give away.
Tim

 

a little bit but i could prolly wash the keyboard. they made me take the keyboard off from india customer support.

 

I thought this was hypothetical

Anyway, I think if everything is fried (not only mobo, but video, processor etc) I think the tech might get suspicious...

however all dell techs are contractors and might not care that much...

 

yeah maybe he should schedule the tech to come on friday during happy hour lol.

 

If he gets really suspicious I would just say that you lent your laptop to a friend and that it was like that when you got it back. It is worth a shot.
Tim

 

lol Tim.. that sounds like the dumbest excuse ever hahaha. If there's no beer smell then you can say that you were working at home when the lights shut off. For some reason the laptop turned off too and didn't come back on after that.

 

Kramer says "it's a write off Jerry"

[ et.com/albums/l289/ctrulock/write-

 

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Bleh cant do pix lol

 

now it smells like OZIUM

 

at least it doesn't smell like Zima and Jolly Ranchers.

 

Unfortunately, that's going to be really easy to see... he'll say:
"why did you take it apart? you voided the warranty by trying to fix it yourself"
"flash overclocking with an unupported update voids your warranty"
"warranties don't cover liquid damage of any sort"

and probably tell you he and dell can fix it out of warranty for 6-800 dollars or so, and that it will take four weeks to give it back, minus all your data.

Hypothetically... Sorry to say, one of those three is likely to be the case. You might even have to pay for the service call if they figure out it was a ruse!

 

mm I'm don't quite agree...

I'm not sure that the tech will see that the laptop was opened unless the original poster has left tool scratch marks and such. Dell also allows their customers to open certain parts of laptops to install certain components w/o voiding warranty.

If the video card is fried the tech will never know it's been overclocked, and if it's not fried then he won't have to touch it.

If the laptop components were dried then it might not be obvious that something was spilled on the laptop. Esp. if the poster got lucky and fried just the mobo and nothing else.

 

from now on though I would highly recommend an external, mouse, keyboard and a notebook stand similar to this one:



I'm kinda cheap, so I made one out of a cookbook stand for about $10 and it works great. Helps with laptop's cooling and makes it harder to spill obscene amounts of liquid onto it. Also holds textbooks (with the laptop on the stand) during those rare moments when I'm doing homework

 

The question is your keyboard. The tech will pull your laptop down and replace the old parts, fans, cpu,gpu, ect. on the new motherboard.

If your keyboard or other starts dripping stale beer you might deadpan something about Chinese beer? Hopefully you can get the tech to work with you..it's not like anything out of his pocket

The tech also has to send back all repaced parts, another possible, er sticky point.

 

Well I cancelled dell tech because it came back to life in the morning. I washed the keyboard really good but the keyboard is dead so I bought a new one on ebay ($24.99). In the mean time I bought a 40$ wireless usb keyboard/mouse at circuit city and am really digging it. I will use it from now on cause it's well wireless and if i spill on it no beer will leak onto my mobo. I need a laptop keypad so I can get into bios (the usb one will not work untill windows loads up). So I'm pretty happy, as it seems Dell makes one hell-o-tough e1705 because this thing was pouring beer out of the air intakes, it was soaked bad!

 

This is for those who say Dell's quality sucks

 

If the tech notices the beer smell or starts asking questions, offer him a beer or two and see what happens.

 

Eh you know if liquid gets inside you might eventually have corrosion and then the board dies. Then when they come to see it'll be quite clear it was some sort of liquid damage. I suggest you get the dell guy to come back and swap it.