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MBP + Dr Pepper = Surgery!

E

erik321

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 19, 2009
1
0
Hello everybody,

Last week I accidentally spilled some dr pepper on my 3 weeks old mbp..
First thing I did was to shut down and remove the battery, next I tried to remove as much of the sticky substance as I could with some paper towels. After that I used a hairdryer (without heating) to dry my mbp further. Left it to rest one night, but the next day i didn't dare turning it on.. So I put on some rubber gloves, grabbed my toolkit and started the surgery! Dug all the way down to the keyboard only to find that the dr pepper didn't get past the keyboard! All the parts inside where untouched!:) So I put it all together again and tried to start it. It started with a black screen but then, suddenly out of nowhere Mac OS X started! I couldn't believe how incredibly lucky I was, until I found out that the keyboard backlight wasn't functioning properly. Only in the middle there was a little light, at the edges there was hardly any. I couldn't live with this imperfection so I did another surgery. This time I removed the backlight of the keyboard and there I saw the problem. There are 6 LEDs and a 'light divider' which divides the light over the keyboard. Some sticky dr pepper stopped the light from reaching the sides of the keyboard. I cleaned it all with some demineralized water and made sure everything was dry. I put it back together and voila, everything is fine again!
Just wanted to share this little adventure with you guys.
Here are some pictures:

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/2941/dsc05756.jpg
http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/5420/dsc05762w.jpg
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/6127/dsc05759.jpg
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4411/dsc05761.jpg
http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/954/dsc05774v.jpg
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/3883/dsc05779a.jpg

Greetings from the Netherlands!
:apple::D
 
You got really, really lucky. Isn't the keyboard on the uMBP the hardest part to get to? Don't you have to take apart the whole laptop just to get to the keyboard?
BTW, once you clean it with water, you could have used some alcohol to displace the water. The alcohol would then evaporate taking the water with it.
 
you seem pretty handy. i cant wait to take mine apart. im going to wait until im about to get a new one. i really enjoyed taking apart my old G4 iBook and then putting it all back together. and i wouldnt say that you were lucky, you had the skills to fix the problem and did everything to save you computer. good work.
 
Maybe I haven't read enough on hear, but it seems almost every new macbook/macbook pro has survived a water/juice/soda incident, with water seeing fairly good results that have been reported on MR.
 
ViciousShadow21 said:
you seem pretty handy. i cant wait to take mine apart. im going to wait until im about to get a new one. i really enjoyed taking apart my old G4 iBook and then putting it all back together. and i wouldnt say that you were lucky, you had the skills to fix the problem and did everything to save you computer. good work.
Click to expand...

I meant that he was lucky that the soda didn't get passed the keyboard. But you're right, a lot of it probably had to do with the OP's ability to take a MBP almost completely apart and put it back together again.
 
You dodged a bullet, and hopefully this will be a good lesson that you really should have any liquid near the laptop.
 
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