What to do with old Macbook

[mrout]

Hello,

I have a Black Macbook 13", my roomate spilled coke on it, out of warranty, and apple says $750 to fix. AKA not worth it.

(It had a 500GB upgraded hard drive, and 2 Gigs ram, maxed out).

Should I try to get it fixed somewhere else?
Try to sell it to some kind of used dealer for parts?
Try to run some diagnostics and repair it myself?
Just keep the hardware because it's not worth doing anything?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[GFSarah]

I'd say it depends on how bad the damage is. I spilled chocolate milk on a Dell laptop (266MHz - wow, the good old days) in college (I would have DIED if that had been my MBP!), and I just shut it off immediately, took it apart, cleaned it with some denatured alcohol, laid it out to dry for a day or two, then put it back together, said a little prayer, and it worked just fine. It got up under the keyboard & all over the motherboard, too. But it worked just fine for years after that.

If you're okay with technology & stuff, I'd say take it apart yourself, clean it with denatured alcohol (or regular rubbing alcohol if you can't get ahold of denatured), let it dry, and put it back together. If you can't or don't want to do that, I'd say take the hard drive out (that's got to be worth some money - and it's got all your data on it) and sell it to someone for parts. Hopefully when you say it's not worth $750 to repair, that means you can just buy a new one ... if that's the case, then just get ahold of a hard drive enclosure and you can either pull off the data you want to keep, or forget the enclosure and replace the stock HD with your old one. I don't know what OS you have on it, but it could be an option.

Obviously it's up to you, and there's no right or wrong answer ... but those are my thoughts.

 

[clutchn]

make him buy you a new one lol, but besides that just take it apart try and clean it if you can, and that doesnt work i would sell the parts and buy a new macbook
sorry for your loss

 

[iTone]

Make your roommate pay for a new one. If he refuses take him to see Judge Judy!

 

[mrout]

My roommate respectably did pay me for the damage, and I put in extra to get a new macbook pro.

I would imagine that the motherboard is really just shot at this point and will not benefit from cleaning since it has been turned on a bunch of times (for testing) without luck. If it would have got turned off immediately, then I would def try to clean it.

Can anyone recommend a place to sell broken laptops? I know the parts are valuable, like the RAM, the screen, the body, superdrive etc.

 

[flopticalcube]

ebay it, just be honest.

 

[GFSarah]

If that's the case ... Yep; I'd say pop that 500G HD (SURELY you want to keep that) and list it on eBay or CraigsList or something like that. Describe it honestly and I'm sure a geek somewhere (maybe even one of us around here!) will be happy to snap it up and play with it. Come to think of it, you're probably likely to get more money taking your chances with eBay or something rather than walking in to a local shop that buys used computers and parts. Many local places have to pay out based on what someone higher up dictates on a list, and if that's the case, they won't pay crap.

 

[Foreign Feeling]

thats one nice roomate of yours. I hope if that ever happens to me (which i pray doesnt), I hope my roomate would be kind enough to pay for the damages

 

[mrout]

Accidents happen, and whoever causes them should be responsible. I'd do the same thing (at least I hope)!!!!

Thanks much for the advice.

And here's a helpful tip that may save you in the future:

If you are not using your laptop, or you are going to leave your desk, just SHUT THE LID!!!!

 

[hackia]

spare parts

do some surgery on the computer and sell spare parts,
seems like you have it paid for so make some more money.

people will buy the spare parts, it seems motherboard is frieds,

but screen, shell cover, hard drive are worth something, you can ebay parts and make a nice chunk of change.