Cup of tea spilt into G4 Powerbook - what to do?

[autopilot]

Sometimes just does not say it...

A friend of mine is in a bit of bother. She spilt a cup of tea in the keyboard of her shiny new £2,000 G4 laptop. She has no home insurance or extended warrenty. She phoned me, being the techie in our group of friends, asking what to do. I told her not to panic, don't turn it on and remove the battery, then try and shake the water out and put somewhere warm and dry for at least a week. Unfourtunately she had already done exactly what she should have not have done - turned it on to see if it worked. Thus probably making things 10 times worse and nearly getting a nasty shock. I can understand why she did though. Anyway, she told me that many of the keys did not work, neither did the sound or networking, bluetooth and a few other things. Harddrive seems intact though. Oh, and I asked her what was in the tea - she said it was black with no suger which I guess may help (less sticky).

It's still buggered, so what are her options? Has anyone dealt with this before? I am not sure if the water has soaked into the PCB and damaged that, or if her using it has shorted some chip out. What componants are most likely to be affected and could someone give me an idea of the potential costs involved. Would it be worth sending it Apple for repair, or an independant repairs company? Is it possible it's still recoverable? Do you think we could get away wit pleading ignorance and seeing if they will do it under warrenty (it's about 2 months old)?

Any info/adivise welcome.

Cheers people

[DaftpuNk]

I think you could recover the hard disk perhaps, and so that data would be fine. Although my best idea would be to be 100% honest about the whole thing in correspondance to warranty people at Apple UK.

Any news on this one?

[Stephen B]

fixing the keys should be relatively easy as they are mostly mounted on a thin membrane before touching the keyboard pcb on practically every laptop I have seen, spray with copious amount of foaming cleaner, and if you can get access to a compressed airline [not easyjet] all the better. A few repeats of this process should removed the offending coffee.

if you actually have a pemanently stuck key maybe that is contributing to other things not starting up.

its a pretty common thing to haapen to a laptop so a decent 3rd party repair shop should also be able to sort this issue out, the problem is finding one who doesn't think you are an open cheque book because you bought an apple

but definately contact the warranty company in 1st instance who may be more forgiving than you think

[CocoPops]

strip it down and clean it in the hope it works.

I really don't hold out much hope tho, the apple stuff is well packed and there's not much room for error.