[geeks] Macbook probably KIA, now what?

[Mark Benson]

On 17 May 2009, at 21:09, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:

> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 3:39 PM, William Barnett-Lewis
> <wlewisiii at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Oh, joy. My 7 year old just dumped a nearly full coke on top of my
>> Macbook. I've got all the bits opened up and have been drying it with
>> them take the 2 & 1 gb sticks from my Macbook (1st gen core2 dual) or
>
>
>
>> the 300gb sata drive I just put into it? I haven't look at them much
>> at all as I'd hoped to get several more years out of my Macbook &
>> can't really afford new right now anyway...
>
>
> As long as the HD is intact and running this becomes pretty easy.
>
> First, dry it out and give it a shot. my daughter decided my  
> MacBook, also a
> 1st gen (core duo, not a core 2 duo) was thirsty for strawberry  
> milk. I was
> lucky, and only needed to replace the keyboard.

I was gonna say, don't write the bugger off until you *know* it  
doesn't still work. The secret to that kind of accident is to flip it  
upside down as fast as you can and yank the power and battery ASAP. I  
dropped a load of coke in my Powerbook G4 in Berlin in January and,  
after sitting upside down with the keyboard detached for a while, it  
fired up and worked fine. It's not always spilling crap in them that  
kills them it's what you do immediately afterwards :)

Still, if it is dead then I'd take up GSM's suggestion of an MSI Wind,  
or look into whether anyone has managed to get a HP 2140 working with  
it. 2140s aren't the cheapest Atom netbook out there but I have a 2133  
(same casing with a smaller screen and a VIA CPU) but they are a  
definite cut above most of the cheap ones. The keyboard is very  
similar to Apple's older laptop keyboards and is 93% size which makes  
it a joy to type on.

-- 
Mark Benson

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