HELP! Major computer damage

Hello everyone. I had a slight accident on Monday with my laptop (Acer Aspire 8350G, running W 7). Well ok, we were celebrating St. Patrick's Day, and the glass of wine was put a little to close to the laptop - something I NEVER do, but wasn't paying attention. Anyway, a small amount of wine sploshed into the keyboard. I quickly mopped up and shut it down (but never thought of removing the battery, doh!), and now it turns on, makes lots of beeps, and asks me what OS I want. The only choice is W7. The keyboard is not working, so I plugged in an external keyboard and tried to boot into safe mode. It will do this but when I click on the repair option, it just turns off again.


Tried it again, several times, and it starts to load the files for repair, and then shuts down again.


Is that it? Gone, dead, useless, or is there something I haven't thought of?


I have the 4-CD recovery set I made when I first bought it, but it won't read from those. Can I make some sort of boot disk from the other Acer Aspire 5253, and I have backed up everything, but would hate to lose this laptop.


All advice and suggestions will be gratefully received. Thanks.

Do an ebay search for a replacement keyboard Sheila. they can be alot cheaper than you think.

The last one I replaced only cost 6 quid.

THANK YOU! Thanks to everyone for their responses with advice, tea, sympathy. Update: I put the poor thing through all sorts last night, including "repair", "safe mode", "last known good config", etc., etc. Then decided to pop out the keyboard. This I was able to do easily enough, although it did take me about half an hour (and caused Henry's eyebrows to raise at the bad language he could hear from the other side of the room). Cleaned the back of the keyboard, and replaced it. No change. More alarmingly, I was getting a message that I couldn't change the password because "No Drive". About to give up, I took out the keyboard once more, disconnected it, rebooted, and voila! Everything is fine and working perfectly (except for the keyboard of course), and I can easily use a USB keyboard, so I'm not going to spend money on a new keyboard for it. Thank you all again. Bisous, bisous!

Hmm. Battle Pirates? Must look that one up. I appreciate your advice, and I'm not going to spend money before I have eliminated everything else, as you say. If it's dead, it's dead. Thankfully I'm not stuck, brought a cheap, smaller version of the Acer Aspire as a back up when we moved over 3 years ago, and last year bought the Dell desktop, so can carry on with the paid work, as well as faffing about here.

It's just a lovely machine (well it was) with a nice 18.4" HD screen, and I shall miss it, if I can't resuscitate it. Thanks.

You are an angel Brian. Thank you so much for all time time taken with this. I'll have to try and find a second USB stick, because I already have Ubuntu on the first one.

Thanks, Steve.

Floppy! No, but it would be fun trying to remember all the MS DOS commands. Showing my age now,. :-)

Hope you get it sorted.

No, Steve I couldn't last night. It varies between getting stuck at asking me to choose my OS, or will go through loading the repair files, and starts running repair, then switches off. I'm going to try again, but need the external keyboard for work I'm doing at the moment (paid work!).

Did you say that you can boot into safe mode Sheila ?

Sh*t can happen. If you haven't drowned the laptop completely at least all your data are fine. As Brain already wrote: use for now an external keyboard and order a new keyboard. Acer has its service somewhere in the middle of France and its delivered in 2 days max (UK keyboard you may have to get from the UK) Anyway, once it arrives you take a small knife and press on the top left & right this little plastics inside. The keyboard then unlocks and you can pull it out. Then disconnet the cable carefully, then attach the new one to the same slot and press the keyboard back into the laptop; these are just sensitive plastic clips, so be carefull. Keyboard will be around 45 €. So just don't worry, its not the world end ;-) and you'll get this done yourself. This link to video here is for another model but Acers system is very similar to all their Laptops. What I would certainly NOT do is fiddling with another OS when my keyboard is not working properly and I risk not to have full control over what I do..

Thanks Trevor. Never thought of the keys being sticky. Will pop out the keyboard later and clean .

You need to have the keyboard cleaned, the wine will stick the keys down etc. The computer is being confused into thinking that a number of keys are being pressed at the same time. Needs to go to a Laptop specialist

I'm trying to download it from the Ubuntu page to the USB stick. It asks me to browse to the .iso but I can't find it. Grrr.

My son - a computer chap - says that the first thing you do if a computer has something spilt on it is remove the battery before you do anything else. Too late I know, but good advice for a mobile phone too.

Thanks Brian. I'm annoyed with myself, as it has been a mantra in my house (particular when the four girls were teenagers), no liquid near computers. Oh well. I'll certainly try with Linux. Will it recognise it from a disk or memory stick?

Will try that now, and report back.

Thanks, Suz. Obviously my Irish laptop did not take kindly to wine from Languedoc!

Oh dear - bad luck Sheila - can't help I'm afraid but I do feel for you although if it have been Guinness you'd spilt on it then of course it would be working fine now ;)