What happens when you are watching your favorite episode of Seinfield while your trying to slam the last of your coffee and Kramer bursts in with his usual insanity and you spit up your beverage all over your expensive laptop?

Well, assuming you don’t see or smell burning, hear a bzzzzzzt sound or see the thing shut off ,you may be able to prevent disaster.

First - unplug it and or shut it down before moving the laptop in any way (quickly as possible).

Second run over and place a towel over it to soak up any remaining liquid.

Third - remove the battery without tipping over the laptop (we don’t want the liquid to travel any deeper than it already has.

Now I would suggest allowing the Laptop to sit for a few days in a warm environment with a fan blowing over it. Now if you are unable to wait that long, you can try cracking it open and cleaning it out immediately but you’ll run the risk of getting liquid on the cmos battery and causing a short. Its impossible to predict what damage is already done at this point.

If it’s coffee (or any sugary/sticky liquid) we are dealing with we need to do a bit more cleanup. Most laptop manufacturers provide online schematics of how to disassemble them. Please consult them before beginning operation. And a word of advice: Take careful note of how many case screws you remove, keep little sandwich baggies to separate the different screws. taking pictures of the laptop as you remove its layers helps a lot!

Once the mother board has been removed you need to identify the cmos battery and determine if it was damaged, remove it and clean it off. Coffee or soda can’t be simply wiped away so you’ll need to use DENATURED ALCOHOL to remove dried residue. The hard-drive is probably not damaged in most cases since they are sealed into their case. I don’t recommend disassembling hard-drive case because the internal parts are very sensitive to contamination. so just remove it clean the exterior and place it aside. The cd-rom drives will need to be thoroughly inspected inside. Depending on how far the beverage soaked into the individual components you may need to soak parts in the alcohol to ensure a good cleaning.

Typically keyboards are never the same after a spill so be prepared to replace it if the laptop otherwise survives. You also may need to remove the SO-DIMMS to get underneath the crevices. Finally allow everything to dry before reassembling, this should take a few hours. Good luck and this time back up your data!