Sasmung Centrino Notebook suffered a cup of coffee. Anything repariable?

[gonzo0815]

Hi all,
a friend of mine has split a large cup of coffee with milk & sugar over a Samsung laptop (centrino, ATI 9700 mobile gfx) diretlcy over the keypad. The device was running and stoped working imediately. The coffee comes out from all possible wholes.

No if the assurance won`t pai for the dammage i will probably celan the device and try to repair it.
What could easily be destroyed from sutch an condition?
In my opinion there should`t be that mutch dammage as the voltages in a laptop aren`t that high expet for the main vrm unit. I think that may be some feets , the keypad and may be the optical drives could be afekted, but the other elektronic should work again after thoroughfull cleaning. Or i am wrong there?

[arneson]

I believe the caffiene would overload the central nervous system resulting in massive stroke.
That lap will never be the same.

[gonzo0815]

But then it should be faster and especially the GFX should be very fast, as it has got a extra large dose of coffee.

[kc8adu]

if you unplugged it and pulled the battery quickly a cleanup may revive it.
you have a time consuming job ahead of you if you let it dry.i am thinking of marketing a glue made of coffee and cream/sugar.

[moddolicous]

If I were him, I'd take the laptop apart and let it air out for a while (a day at least). Hopefully that'll help. If not, then theres not much he can do. Heres a thread that may help you:
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthr...3&page=2&pp=15

[gonzo0815]

For immediate cleaning it is too late now, but i am not afraid to do the cleaning procedure in the thread mentioned. I thought already by my self on that.
Any way, we will see how it comms to me.

[Rainbow]

If it's dead, you have nothing to lose as the warranty is void too. Disassemble it and check where the liquid was. Then try to clean the affected parts and let completely dry before testing.

[gonzo0815]

I have cleaned the laptop an all parts (like intel wlan mini pci, cpu, modem/lan board and memory sticks full of dried coffee, power modules mainboard etc.) now with some grease remover, water and brush.
After that i rinsed it with distilled water and finaly with some 50% akohol to rins of some of the pure water. Finally i blowed the water / akohol with a anti dust aircann away those BGA style soldered chips, the cpu soket and other semiconductors with a narrow gap.
After 2 days in the zentral heating room at about 30 to 35°C and very dry air i reasembled it. Now it is running fine again. At the moment i it is running some windows memory diagnostic for a while, to chek if the memory and other circuits had ben dammage buy the necesarily rough handling. Later i probably will do some burn in with Prime 95 and then i give it back to do the finall windows XP test with the HDD, wich i don`t have atm.

During the disasembling, there was an thermal adhesive pad on the Radeon 9700mobility chip wich had ben dammaged. I managed to put it back on the chip in parts, don`t know if that will conduct enough heat anymore.
Does anyone know if that pad is that important? what is the exact name for that? i am not that skilled in messing around with laptops (in fact i hate that stuff).
I don`t think it would be a good idear to replace it with 1mm thermal grease due to the required thickness .

The CPU and the heathpipe was covered with a very very hard kind of thermal grease. It was loking like those normal, grey thermal pads wich all new hsf have aplied, but it was so hard i cant scratch it. I removed it finally with some acetone, and used some Arctic MX-1 grease.

[arneson]

It may be addicted now like I am, on my third cup right now.

What you did was very sensable, congrats on it working.
The really vulnerable part was the keyboard itself, I'm amazed it still works.

[gonzo0815]

Well this keyboard is very robust, it is the usuall cheap foil with some rubber pins. As long as there is no fluid geting between the two foils it will be ok, in all other cases there is no hope to get it working again. Therefore i have not cleaned it. May be the coffe is a bit sticky, but on that specially desinged keypad the funktionality is not mutch afekted. I think this pad is somhow water proof, as there are no wholes in the foil itself. I poped one of those ruber huts and now this one key won`t works any more.... it is the F1 key
May be some glue will help to keep the hut n the place during cliping in the key.

I have had some Logitech keyboards, and i have never got on repaired by cleaning and drying. Same desing, but the foils are not glued togehter.

Any way, the future will show, if the time it tooks me to clean this laptop was a good investment..... I am shure under the cpu soket there is ome coffee left. But i won`t mess around with a few hundred of contackts in an opend soket.

I am a little but suprised too that i got it working, as this laptop refused to do anything before the cleaning....

PS: i have one of those fully automated coffee mashines, and well i drink a lot of espresso through the day hey where is the coffee smily?
Coffee automate repair is one of my hobbies, therfore i got this unit very cheap from ebay, it is a 1200€ unit. Very solid build, not that plastik like Jura &co.

[arneson]

So if my coffee maker has a bad cap it will ooze brown stuff?

I think I've had to much.

[willawake]

on that specially desinged keypad the funktionality is not mutch afekted. I think this pad is somhow water proof

i was just checking samsung notebooks for a client, they are advertising spill resistant keyboard.

[gonzo0815]

Well then i am right with my guess. I wondered if the desing of this keypad could have accidentally that waterproof

Now, the Laptop is working fine, played a round of CSS with it. Keypads are still a little sticky. May be i wash it, but i am not shure if it is realy that waterproof.

But i noticed, that the laptop is not working from battery. I had it about half an hour on the wallplug during the ram test. May be the charging unit or the contacts are still smutty.

I have sen an "smart battery calibration" item in the bios. Could it be possible, that i have to do that again after the cmos was completely cleared (removed the cmos batery, during cleaning). Or is it more likely that the charg unit or something else have been gotten bad.

[Per Hansson]

Originally Posted by gonzo0815

I have sen an "smart battery calibration" item in the bios. Could it be possible, that i have to do that again after the cmos was completely cleared (removed the cmos batery, during cleaning). Or is it more likely that the charg unit or something else have been gotten bad.

The data about the battery is kept in a chip in the battery itself

This data can become incorrect if you do not completley discharge the battery some times, thus the laptop will shutdown when the battery infact is not yet flat

The calibration cycle in some laptop BIOSes circumvent this logic, the laptop will run untill the battery is 100% flat and then shutdown for obvious reasons...

I would carefully read the manual for any important info about any requirements to run such a test, because you can destroy the battery with such a test if it is done imporperly

[gonzo0815]

This sounds interesting, may be it is worth a try. But the calibration tool should be safe, there is no waring about that. It simply says that this option will charge the battery untill full and then discharge it. I don`t think that this would make the thing exploding like a Dell

May be there are only som dirty contkts, as i havent`t cleaned them yet.

[arneson]

What you have is now a high capacity LI-Ion-Cafenated bat.