Left-click button not working - spilled water

Hello guys,

I hope you can help me with this one - a Lenovo X300 owner.
I spilled a bit of tea (truly not much) on my keyboard....everything was working fine with the exception of left-click button (in fact both the left key bottoms above and below the track pad would not work, neither did double-clicking on the pad itself). I tried the following:
- run it in safe mode
- reinstall the mouse drivers
- switch the right-click for left-click in control panel/mouse (this worked after reinstall of the system)
- rejuvenate the system
- eventually reinstall the whole thing to factory settings.

Nothing worked - right-click button is fine, the left-click buttons (i.e. both above and below the track-pad) show no response. The left-click buttons wouldn't work in Recovery and Rescue either.
I had to conclude that this is a hardware problem and that probably the spill was the cause.
Now this is a 3-year old computer, no warranty.
Is there anything else I could try to do?
I am thinking of taking apart the keyboard and trying to see if I can somehow dry it? (the whole thing is dry but there could be some water inside?...). Or is the circuitry simply fuked? (I am worried that this might be the case given that the left-click button below the trackpad which is not part of the keyboard isn't working either).
If I do take apart, try to have it dry somehow and it still shows no signs of recovery, what's the next step? How much would this cost to get it fixed? (I am afraid more than what I am willing to pay.... ).
New keyboard would probably not cut, would it? (I have found that one can get one for as cheap as 80USD).
Thank you for your advice,

Christina

ps. I do have a temporary solution: have set up the top right-click button as my left-click button while using the bottom right-click button as a regular right-click button.

 

obviously cleaning is the first step, but if that don't work then try to find a replacement keyboard would be the next best option.

If it is the circuitry on the motherboard that is the cause of the problem, then the cost of repair would go up exponentially.

 

Thank you Lead_org for the answer.
Any idea as to what would be the best way for cleaning stuff like that?

 

some people have tried to rinse the keyboard itself with distilled water and then dried it (with some successes). If all else fails you can try this method and see what happens, the worst that can happen is that you may need a new keyboard.

 

I've resurrected several keyboards by giving them a good bath and scrub in a bowl of hot water with some washing up liquid (one needs to get rid of the dried drink). The distilled water is an option for the rinsing stage. The keyboard then needs to be thoroughly dried before reinstallation.

John

 

Update here:

Here is what I have done: took away the keyboard, cleaned it a bit and yes, it worked! The upper left-click button started working again (the one which is part of the keyboard....not the lower left-click button...unfortunately there's no way how to get to that unless I would take the whole computer apart, it seems). I also managed to reinstall the whole system to its factory settings (it had originally Vista on).

BUT..

while downgrading Vistas to XPs (yes, basically another installation...this was the solution Lenovo offered to people who didn't want to use Vistas 3 years ago) the installation process got stuck with a serious error...
most likely reason: I noticed that the buttons started acting up again....it behaved as if the left-click button was constantly pushed down....
The installation got so screwed that I had to start all over again with Vistas first....
But this time the same error appeared also during the Vista installation (again, the right-click button seemingly being pushed down all the time, this was the most obvious cause).

So I took away the lower left-click button (which has never worked ever since the spill) and have restarted the 4th installation...hopefully I am going to get it done before the buttons interfere with the installation.

Now it seems to me that the problem might not be the keyboard itself but the contacts that transmit the signals from the keyboard to the motherboard. There are two thin metal strips underneath the upper left and right-click buttons that are attached to the motherboard. When I took the keyboard away I noticed that that there was a little bit of residue (film) on the left metal strip. It's barely noticable but my guess is that the water could have come into contact that metal strip. I tried to clean that and for 1 hour the upper-left click button worked...it stopped working again after that.

What chemical do I need to use for cleaning the contacts?
If my left-click buttons keep acting up, is there a way how to disable them totally?

John and Lead_Org, thanks for taking your time answering my questions..

 

First thought: As a work-around do you have an option to disable the touchpad? Possibly at the BIOS level since the UltraNav software will not work until the software is installed.

For contact cleaning I would try rubbing with a a slightly abrasive pencil eraser (assuming that the contact being cleaned can be supported while being rubbed).

Did your tea include sugar and/or milk? Either of those results in slightly conductive deposits although I think that sugar is the worse of the two.

John

 

John,
I will look into BIOS as soon as the installation is finished. My gut feeling is that there's no option for disabling the mouse there. The developers probably never thought that a asinine mouse issue could cause havoc during OS installation.
As for the content of the tea: it was a fruit tea - fortunately no sugar nor milk. I will try the eraser..sounds like an interesting idea though I must confess I am confused: didn't rubber have insulation qualities? Here's a humanities major speaking here so forgive my ignorance.

 

Ideally you use a slightly abrasive eraser just to rub the contact surfaces to clean them. it should be rubber or plastic with some fine abrasive material. Do you have any clutch pencils with an eraser in the top?

There are also more expensive cleaning devices devices such as this (which contains a bunch of fine glass fibres).

John