Bugger!

This morning I spilled fruit juice over my laptop. It’s dead, deceased, it is no more. As I no longer need a laptop and I’ve been using it as a desktop with remote screen and keyboard, I’m replacing it with a desktop. For the next couple of days, it will be quiet here as trying to type on a small tablet or phone as I am now, is too much of a pain. I expect normal service to resume sometime on Saturday.

19 Comments

  1. Good decision LR. Desktop is more use. Speaking personally since i retired i’ve found a tablet to be most useful for my needs now.

  2. If you are looking for a half decent desktop and you are willing to look at the refurb market then may I suggest that you contact Gigarefurb. I’ve always found their stuff usable for everyday use and they have machines that are low end and low price for wordpro etc or higher end and higher price stuff for graphics etc.

  3. Amazon do a great line of ‘renewed’ kit – very well priced and backed by an Amazon 12 month warranty.

  4. After six years of daily use my laptop keypad gave up the ghost. I sourced a replacement and fitted it and got another year out of it. In the meantime I bought a laptop running Win10. I hated it so went on Ebay and bought a refurbed Dell laptop running Win7 for just over £100. I’ve been using it for well over a year. I like Win7 32bit because I can use all my old programmes (like a twenty year old crack version of Photoshop5 that does everything I need) I use Word 2003 and it only use Win 365 to produce pdfs. I don’t have to faff around with Win10. XP was perfect. Why did they have to ‘uprate’ it? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

    • XP Pro SP3 was perfect

      Plus 100 on that, Win 7 & 10 are like Teletubbie OS where nanny MS says what you may and may not do

  5. A lot of tablets and smartphones have a micro usb port – if you already have a micro usb hub, you should be able to use it to connect a proper keyboard to your portable device.

    Not a great long-term solution, but might be useful as a stopgap until your desktop arrives.

  6. Remove the battery from the laptop then rinse the keyboard in warm water. Drain of the water than let the laptop dry off in a warm place.

    You have nothing to lose after all.

  7. Remove the HD first, before trying this. It’s sealed, so unlikely to have been affected by the fruit juice.
    And you can get a SATA/IDE dongle for a few quid (or a techie mate will lend it) which allows you to connect the loose drive via USB and copy off what you need to the replacement PC.
    Even if the laptop is completely borked, all the data on the HD should be recoverable like this.

      • Apologies for egg-sucking tuition.
        Glad you are making progress in restoration, the inter-thingy would be a duller place without my daily visit here.
        KBO

    • It’s a surface book. I managed to separate the two halves using the paperclip trick. I can now power the screen half which is the main computer. The battery is knackered as it won’t hold a charge. I might pop it into my local repairer and see what it would cost to repair it. If its cost effective, I’ll have a back up machine.

    • Warning on SATA/IDE usb dongles

      Many of the cheap ones come with unregulated PSUs which often kill HDDs

      Regretably, I speak from experience

  8. You’d have been better off drinking vodka. It would evaporate from the laptop and when you finished the bottle you wouldn’t care anyway . . .

  9. One Christmas Eve, long before tablets and smartphones, I spilled a glass of Cointreau over my desktop’s keyboard.

    It was a long, fraught few hours of washing and then replacing every key!

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