Argh, Dyspraxia Strikes Again

[davidgillon]

More specifically my flailing arm struck the side of my pint glass of rum and coke last night, upending it into the laptop.

Obviously I grabbed the laptop and immediately inverted it to drain, but not in time to stop in announcing a hardware failure.

On the positive side it's eight years old and I was supposed to be going out and looking for a new one this week anyway.

On the negative side there's some un-backed up stuff on there, mostly game-related stuff I did over Christmas, I can live without it if need be and I can probably recreate it, though it'll be time consuming.

I'm going to leave it to dry out for a couple of days and then see if it'll boot, if it doesn't I can still pull the hard-drive and see if that works, but really I'd have been much happier if the rum and coke had ended up in me, not the laptop!

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Does bag-of-rice work as well for hard drives as it does for phones?

[cxcvi]

Not sure. I would be tempted to try the hard drive by itself first, though.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I would too.

[davidgillon]

To paraphrase the immortal line from Jaws: We're going to need a bigger bag of rice :)

I'm mostly a fan of chilling hard drives that are being problematic, but I'm not sure that'll be appropriate with one that got wet.

[davidgillon]

A friend who has done school IT tech work says she's used the bag of rice trick successfully on several laptops (but warns you need to cover the ports or you'll never get all the rice out!)

[jesse_the_k]

This is the universe telling you to go to the electronics store. Sorry about the losses, though.

[davidgillon]

It is, isn't it :)

OTOH if I'd followed my original plan I could have been pouring it into the new one instead, and that would have hurt!