I broke my laptop

I'm sorry I don't have an answer (one does not normally think of wine as a highly conductive fluid), but I'd like to comment about insurance.

When I bought my notebook computer a year ago, I splurged on an extended warranty. The warranty covers loss and even accidental damage of the sort you experienced.

Gareth Magennis formulerede spørgsmålet:

Don't drink and surf :-)

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Wine is somewhat conductive. Conductivity testing is used to determine the Potassium concentration of the wine and therefore its stability:

1000 uSiemens/cm isn't very conductive. Compare with sea water, which is about 50,000 uS/cm. In SI units, 1000 uS/cm would be

Get it really cold, and wine improves superconductors:

This is a clue that you screwed up. However, it must be contageous. Last week, I was marching to the bathroom in the middle of the night and stepped on my Thinkpad T30, cracking the LCD screen.

Make and model of laptop? Make and model of LCD panel? I have a few schematics.

The 6 pin IC is probably a voltage regulator or pass FET for part of a regulator. The LVDS interface on the panel is well protected and probably not involved. Here's a typical LCD pinout: Runs on +5VDC which could do that kind of high current heating damage.

Probably, but then shorting the regulator would not cause the ribbon cable connector to smoke. What happened to the ribbon cable? If nothing, then the wine shorted the connector, which caused the regulator to get hot.

Umm... did you remove the laptop battery after the spill?

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Hi Jeff,

Laptop is an Acer Aspire 5739. I found the service manual today but it has no schematics. (best thing about it is the internal speakers - it has a subwoofer "tube" that actually makes the machine sound really good - Acer don't seem to have these on their laptops any more) :(

After the spill, I mopped as much wine as possible from the keyboard, then upended the laptop with the screen open so it was standing on its head in an inverted V. The idea being to keep any liquid off the motherboard. I took out the power adaptor and ran it on its battery, thinking that keeping a supply of warm air going on might be a good idea.

I heard the fizzing whilst it was running on the battery, and recognised it as something blowing up. I know those sounds, yuk. I franctically tried to remove the battery but it was too late by then of course.

I don't know if the LCD cable got damaged, its wrapped in a braid making a round cable, not a ribbon, so is not visible. I was wondering today if the overheating connector was unrelated to the wine - this laptop regularly makes 10 hour long audio recordings in a hot and sweaty club, the LCD remaining permanently on though dimmed to minimum. It is also in daily use at home, and serves as my TV so it has had some use over the 3 years or so of its life.

but yep, don't drink and surf!

Cheers,

Gareth.

QUANTA ZK6. I couldn't find one in my collection. However, this might help:

I recently recycles a similar laptop. Won't boot reliable, won't charge the battery reliably, won't run any OS reliably, etc. I gave up, tore it apart for parts, and recycled what was left.

Oops. That's what killed it.

The parts were getting hot even before you heard the fizzing sound. That's the sound of boiling wine. It was probably too late by then. If you had pulled the battery immediately, you might have had a chance. Upending the laptop was probably a good idea, but I suspect that all it did was spread the wine around.

Incidentally, the sugar in wine probably will make a nice mess of your keyboard. Wash, rinse, blow dry, air dry, wait, and then try it.

Then, what's the ribbon connector on the MB that got fried? It's not the LCD cable. Keyboard? Mouse pad? I can't tell from the photo.

I run two laptops 24x7 as weather stations on mount tops. No problems with melting anything.

Or, get a keyboard cover protector:

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I

Doh!

beeping

got

I'm

I would guess its one of those high current pass powerfets in a 6 pin package, rather than IC as such, are 2 pairs of the pads connected?

hi Jeff,

hope this makes things clearer than my description!

Do you think it is worth me trying to fix this? I've written it off at the moment.

Both plug and socket seem quite badly damaged, but might still work or I could possibly hard wire the power connections. If I can find out what that melted device is I can replace it if I can find one to buy. Do you think there will be further damage? I can buy another keyboard cheap enough on FleaBay.

I ordered another laptop yesterday, but this one did used to sound excellent as a TV / mini hi-fi, and was especially useful for editing the 10 hour recordings without headphones or external speakers.

Thanks,

Gareth.

I'm still rather bemused that a bit of wine could short out a 5v or so line and cause that amount of current to flow.

Blimey.

That's the video connector. I can't tell if there's more damage until you remove the motherboard.

That depends on how much time you have. I found a source for a schematic so that should help identify the parts. However, replacing the video connector and several parts doesn't seem like much fun. A new motherboard would be easier and probably more productive. There are two on eBay for $184 and $199. Seems too high a price. Try other sources.

Also the plug? Well, at least that cable can be easily replaced: However, $28 is too much.

I think the prices are adding up to more than what the laptop is worth.

Replacing the MB is about the only way you can be sure that something else isn't blown.

Yes. Worse, it will probably not be easily visible. Offhand, I would guess(tm) that the 12V or 19V line ended up on the 5V line. Not a good thing for the rest of the circuitry.

Yep. However, it's the other parts that are going to cost. At this point, the price of repair and possibility of additional damage is too high for an economical repair. Pull out the hard disk, LCD panel, CD/DVD, CPU, RAM, wireless, and whatever else looks useful, and recycle the rest. Also, save the screws. They're quite handy as many laptops tend to lose their bottom screws from vibration.

I use an external USB sound device. I have several ranging from cheapo CM108 based dongles, to a Behringer USB something that does 24 bits and 96KHz. The internal sound chips are all too noisy. All my speakers are external as none of my laptops have decent speakers. I also stream wireless audio to the hi-fi using A2DP Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

And I have here in PY a T30 which died one year ago because a bad (flexing) mobo. The best notebook, I ever owned. So I didn`t burried it :(

It has an exellent 1440x1050 SXGA+ w/o any problems, P4 2GHz, 2GB RAM...

2 docking stations (mini and big), tons of spare parts, 5(?) HDD cages, 5 CMOS-Batteries, nothing broken but dents and scratches, keyboard (Portugies with some stickers to convert it to German), complete original WinXP Recovery CD set incl. multilanguage... IBM Service manuals, some schematics...

Also an T22 with boot problems and unstable display control (dead lamps?)

If you will pay the freight cost, I`ll try to ship it to you. Maybe you can transplant some parts to revieve one of the both T30.

Saludos (an alle Vernünftigen, Rest sh. sig) Wolfgang

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I agree. It's a good machine. I fixed the damage last week with a $30 eBay replacement used LCD. However, when I powered it up, the backlighting didn't work. The LCD inverter wasn't putting out any voltage, so I ordered a spare for $5. However, that didn't fix the backlighting. The CCFL tube lit up fine running on external power, so that wasn't the problem. After 4 hrs of futile tinkering, I discovered that stomping on the case had also caused the lid switch to stick in the closed position, which turned off the backlighting. Argh. The T30 is now in a box awaiting shipment to a friend in Portland OR.

Nice. This one has the lesser 1024x768 LCD. I cramed in 3GB of RAM so it runs Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit rather well.

What color are the lamps? If pink, it's probably a dying lamp. If white or just dim, the LCD inverter. If flickering, it might be the LCD inverter, or arcing contacts at the ends of the CCFL lamp. At $5/ea for the inverters, it's easier to replace than to diagnose. Also, an external LCD inverter will light up the CCFL tube so you can tell which is the problem.

No thanks. The T30 is already fixed.

The intermittent motherboard is caused by the BGA chips coming unsoldered from the MB. It can be fixed crudely with a hot air SMT desoldering station, or more correctly with a BGA reballing kit. There are numerous online vendors that will do it for you if you remove the motherboard and put it back together. For example:

Or, you can take your chances with a parts machine:

4 machines for $130 looks tempting. However, I'm into faster machines and those are too old to resell to customers. Those models are also in the class of machines with the defective Nvidia chips.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

OK, so no I'm not going to try and mend this one. The hard drive I need for archiving, and I've a spare charger now for the Acer I've just ordered as a replacement. And all the other bits you mentioned.

Might keep my eye out for more of these though, but without BSOD symptoms.

btw, I use an external USB 24/96 Tascam soundcard, and would never use anything internal for anything remotely serious on any laptop other than for monitoring or use at home.

Thanks for all your help, its been very educational.

Gareth.

It might not have. It might have caused a chip to misbehave, which in turned pulled the excessive current.

Hmm, this is interesting.

I have been assuming that the connector in the photos has a whole load of data pins on the left hand side, and 2 heavier duty pins on the right carrying the power supply. It looks to me that these two power supply pins have been shorted, resulting in localised heating to the point of partially melting the connectors. I have also assumed that this huge increase in current is what killed the melted device that was supplying that current.

I can't otherwise see a scenario whereby a faulty component could have forced such a huge current between these two pins.

Gareth.

The "wrong" voltage on a driver chip's input can push its output into saturation -- and goombye chip.

or rather the connectors use the outer 2 pairs of 2 pins connected in parallel to supply power to the LCD.

True, but something has melted the connectors.

These go to the LCD which is practically physically disconnected from the rest of the laptop and any spilt wine, so an excessive current draw from the LCD seems very unlikely.

Gareth.

Unless the LCD was destroyed by excessive voltages ...............

Gareth.

The cheap shit I drink doubles as battery acid........ JC