Laptop H-2-woes
Jan. 17th, 2012 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuFor several years, I've used an MSI Wind netbook. I bought it for our trip to Israel, and it's been my workhorse ever since. That's what I use for my music composition, my siddur typesetting, my crossword construction, my 'ganza solving. The small screen and keyboard and limited CPU and RAM were minor inconveniences more than offset by the fact it was light enough to toss in my bag without a second thought.
Friday, while I was frantically trying to finish cooking for Shabbat and keep tabs on my Mystery Hunt team, I had my netbook open on the kitchen table, which I don't usually do. Tani had gotten himself a glass of water.... and while I was quickly packing my bag for Hunt, I elbowed his glass of water directly onto the keyboard of my netbook.
Of course, I immediately killed power to the machine and turned it upside down to drain... but Shabbat was minutes away and I couldn't do a completely thorough job. When I got to Hunt and powered it up, I found that several keys had shorted together: when I press 'C', for example, I also get '1' and the backquote character. Needless to say, that somewhat limited what I could do during Hunt, but I managed to work around that.
Tonight I found a tutorial on the web for how to replace the MSI Wind keyboard, so I detached it and cleaned it as well as I could.... but still no go. Perhaps the water left a residue someplace I can't get to. I don't know if the fault is in the keyboard or if water got onto the mainboard.
My options at this point would seem to be (1) try soaking the keyboard in distilled water, letting it dry again, and seeing if that dissolves any deposits inside the keys. (2) Buy a replacement keyboard (I see some online for about $30) and hope that the problem is in fact in the keyboard, not the mainboard, and that the replacement keyboard has the same great key feel that the original MSI keyboard did. (3) Buy a replacement netbook; the going price seems to be about $400 which I don't really want to spend right now. (4) Buy a replacement ultralight laptop for $1000 or so, which I really don't want to spend right now.
So I guess tomorrow I'll get some distilled water, and see if that works, and if not I guess I'll gamble on the $30 replacement keyboard before looking into more expensive options.
Interestingly, I'm not at all concerned about my data. Between Subversion and Dropbox, I have absolutely no doubt that everything I care about is redundantly backed up. I'm dreading the expense and the hassle of setting up a new computer, if need be, but I'm not worried that fifteen years of work on Pesukei d'Zimrah or Siddur Hiddur Tefillah is lost.
Friday, while I was frantically trying to finish cooking for Shabbat and keep tabs on my Mystery Hunt team, I had my netbook open on the kitchen table, which I don't usually do. Tani had gotten himself a glass of water.... and while I was quickly packing my bag for Hunt, I elbowed his glass of water directly onto the keyboard of my netbook.
Of course, I immediately killed power to the machine and turned it upside down to drain... but Shabbat was minutes away and I couldn't do a completely thorough job. When I got to Hunt and powered it up, I found that several keys had shorted together: when I press 'C', for example, I also get '1' and the backquote character. Needless to say, that somewhat limited what I could do during Hunt, but I managed to work around that.
Tonight I found a tutorial on the web for how to replace the MSI Wind keyboard, so I detached it and cleaned it as well as I could.... but still no go. Perhaps the water left a residue someplace I can't get to. I don't know if the fault is in the keyboard or if water got onto the mainboard.
My options at this point would seem to be (1) try soaking the keyboard in distilled water, letting it dry again, and seeing if that dissolves any deposits inside the keys. (2) Buy a replacement keyboard (I see some online for about $30) and hope that the problem is in fact in the keyboard, not the mainboard, and that the replacement keyboard has the same great key feel that the original MSI keyboard did. (3) Buy a replacement netbook; the going price seems to be about $400 which I don't really want to spend right now. (4) Buy a replacement ultralight laptop for $1000 or so, which I really don't want to spend right now.
So I guess tomorrow I'll get some distilled water, and see if that works, and if not I guess I'll gamble on the $30 replacement keyboard before looking into more expensive options.
Interestingly, I'm not at all concerned about my data. Between Subversion and Dropbox, I have absolutely no doubt that everything I care about is redundantly backed up. I'm dreading the expense and the hassle of setting up a new computer, if need be, but I'm not worried that fifteen years of work on Pesukei d'Zimrah or Siddur Hiddur Tefillah is lost.