Help! Powerbook G4 Diet pepsi spill :(

[Mylia]

I was on vacation about a month ago, and being the smart person i am, decided to keep all my electronics (powerbook, ipod, cellphone, nice headphones, digicam) in my shoulder bag. This would have been fine as I am usually pretty careful with that kind of thing, but my boyfriend was drinking a diet pepsi and handed the half full bottle to me and asked me to keep it in my bag. Without thinking, I put it right in there, only to realize a few minutes later that the bottle wasn't completely closed and had filled the bottom 3 inches of my bag with liquid. My powerbook took a hard hit, we drained as much as we could out of it on the spot and just agreed to deal with it all later.

Obviously it wasn't on when the spill happened, but I have since been terrified to even attempt to use it. I have some extremely important information on there that I had not backed up yet (large sections of my novel, my resume, etc..i know, i know, i should have backed it up). So does anyone have any advice on what to do? is there some way to clean the residue and get it into working condition again? What should I do?

 

[GGJstudios]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=spilled+site:forums.macrumors.com&as_qdr=y&btnG=Search

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=34883

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6999222/

 

[NT1440]

If only it had been pepsi max.....


Dont even attempt to turn it on, its pretty much a lost cause. Id personally remove the hard drive, and hope to god you can boot it and get your info from a different computer.

Your G4 is pretty much toast tho.

 

[kick52]

Take out the harddrive, hopefully that hasn't been touched by liquid.
You could still rescue the G4 if it didn't short anything (if the battery and the liquid met.)

 

[California]

Yes take out the hard drive. And the optical drive. And then lightly rinse the whole thing with distilled water to get rid of any syrup or sugars which would cause a short. Distilled water will not hurt electronics if you let it dry properly. If your hard drive was unaffected, I'll bet it works fine.

I dripped a lot of plastic cleaner once into an iBook and I did the water trick, let it dry for a few days and it was fine.

 

[Pixellated]

This may sound strange, but as the drink had sugar in it, it will make residue. Bathe the board in water, dry it in a bag of raw rice. Get some rubbing alcohol and clean any residue you see. Worked for me.

EDIT: California beat me to it