What to Do When You Spill Water on Your Laptop

I’m writing from recent, personal experience in this post. I’m hoping that my advice will be preventive for you. I was getting myself a drink of water and I set it down next to my laptop, then managed to jiggle the cup and lost about half a cup of water directly onto my laptop keyboard. Most of the water stayed on the keyboard, but a little seeped through to the hardware underneath, causing to laptop to spontaneously shut down. Not a good sign.

How much is too much?

Spilling a mouthful of water onto your laptop generally isn’t too much of a big deal. The keyboard on a typical laptop is generally a tray that is water-tight and can take minor spills. The problem is when the quantity of water that is spilled onto the keyboard is so great that it runs over the side of the keyboard tray and gets underneath. Dribbling a little water on your laptop isn’t a big deal, it’s when you get a slosh that’s more than about a quarter of a cup that things start to get hairy. That’s when you join the Brotherhood of the Bedraggled Laptop (sisters welcome too).

First Steps

The first thing to be done is to unplug the laptop as quickly as possible and turn it over as smoothly and quickly as possible and remove the battery. You’re fighting gravity here, and seconds count. Unfortunately, my laptop shut itself down within three seconds, which was too fast for me to do anything about it. The goal is to get the laptop turned over fast enough that the water stops seeping downward and reverses course, at which point gravity becomes your friend, not your tormenter. It is important not to shake the laptop back and forth. One might assume that this dislodges water, but really all you are doing is spreading the water over more internal components.

Once the laptop is opened up flat, with the keyboard and screen face down and the power plug and battery pulled, move it somewhere it can dry out like a towel or a bed. Something that will help soak up the water.

Give It Time

Once you’ve performed the laptop first aid described above, it’s time to get some tools together. You’ll want to pull the hard drive out and inspect it for water, and this usually involves a Philips #1 screwdriver. Fortunately for me, my HD came out unscathed and none of my data was lost. You’re going to want to undo all of the screws that hold panels onto the bottom of your laptop, open it up and look for signs of water. Also, this will help air it out. Leave the laptop as dissassembled as you can manage to let it breathe. The harsh reality is that you should leave your computer like this for a week. Yes, I said a week. A major spill is a serious situation and you want to allow the computer to fully dry out before attempting to start it up again.

Recover Your Data

If you aren’t tech saavy, you may need help for this next step. You’ll want to find a way to check your hard drive. This may mean installing it in another computer. Another option is to buy a device which will allow you to hook up your hard drive to another computer via USB. This can either be an enclosure, which turns an internal device into an external device. Or, it could be just a cable that attaches to your hard drive. The cables are usually about half the price of the full enclosure, but your laptop may be out of commission permanently, and if you need your data to be portable to survive a while without your trusty computer by begging computer time from friends, an enclosure may be a good investment.

Pick up the Pieces

Once you’ve allowed a week for your laptop to fully dry out, put the pieces back together and see if it starts up. If nothing has been seriously damaged by shorting out, it may start up OK. Laptops do sometimes survive a dousing, but damage can happen to a laptop in two ways in this situation. If water hits a critical component while electricity is flowing through it, that can cause the component to short out, which is very bad.

The second way that an internal component can be damaged is if the internal components get corroded. Essentially, the components rust. Even a small amount of water can start this process, and once it starts it just gets worse. The tough part about this is that it doesn’t cause obvious damage, it just causes the computer to start to behave unusually as electricity starts to have a hard time getting to where it’s supposed to go. So, once your computer successfully restarts, keep an eye on it. If you’re very, very lucky you might suffer no ill effects from your misadventure.

Replacing Parts

The most likely part of your laptop to suffer damage in this situation is the motherboard. The motherboard is the large part that everything else plugs into. It’s like the frame of a car. It is a flat piece of silicon that sits internally just a little smaller than the width and depth of the laptop. The reason why it most easily gets damaged is that it’s everywhere inside the computer. If your computer starts up alright, but then starts acting funny, take it to a repair shop and have them open it up. With luck, they’ll be able to see where the water got in, assess the damage, and find you a replacement motherboard. If you’re unlucky, it won’t be obvious where the water was or else the cost of a motherboard replacement will be too large a portion of what the laptop cost in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Spilling water on your laptop is a bad idea. Desktops are less of an issue, because they usually are better protected from spills by their cases and the fact that they don’t lay like a sun-basking cat directly beside where you like to place your drink.

Be careful. If you do spill water, act quickly and use common sense to pull the plug and use gravity to reverse the water that’s seeping toward your motherboard, then dry the computer out.

Ruggedized Laptops

Some computer makers provide a line of Rugged laptops. a Ruggedized laptop usually is sealed against spills, has a stronger outer shell, and a shock-mounted hard drive that’s less likely to get damaged in a fall. For those of us who have been through the horrors of a water spill, that sort of thing starts to make a lot of sense.