[Noisebridge-discuss] Mac Book Pro + Water = Sad Mac Keyboard

[Andrew Mallis]

It's called de-natured alcohol. You can get it at the hardware store.
I once took apart a MBP keyboard, cleaned all the keys and re-assembled them. It worked. For a while.
50-50 you'll need a new keyboard in the end.

--Andrew



On Mar 5, 2012, at 7:38 PM, Brian Morris wrote:

> That would be the highest % of rubbing alcohol not the cheapo 50 or 75% which has the water you don't want.
> 
> On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Daniel Pitts <coloraura.com at gmail.com> wrote:
> You could try washing it with an alcohol solution (rubbing alcohol), and hoping that displaces enough of the material to fix the problem, but chances are you'll need to replace the keyboard. 
> On 3/3/12 2:31 PM, Jared Dunne wrote:
>> NB-
>> 
>> My gf spilled a decent amount of water on my old 17" MBP's keyboard the other day.  I was wondering if people with experience with similar incidents with A1212 17" MBPs could share some tips.
>> 
>> I immediately turned it off, unplugged, and removed the battery.  I inverted it and wiped down as much of the water as possible.  I left it inverted overnight.
>> 
>> The next day I put back in the battery and powered it up.  It worked fine except some of the keys were "stuck", meaning it was acting like they were held down, namely some combination of shift, control, and command.  The behavior was that when I typed everything was in all CAPS and numbers were punctuation, etc.  Also when I clicked links in the web browser they opened in new windows.
>> 
>> I found some helpful videos on http://www.powerbookmedic.com and used them to dissemble the MBP and remove the keyboard.  Once removed, I was better able to remove various crud that had found its way under the keys over the last 4-5 years.  I then ran it under fresh water (didn't submerge) then allowed it to dry for 36 hours.
>> 
>> The following evening I tried reassembling the machine.  I had some trouble getting the keyboard's ribbon cable back snugly into it's slot, so I'm not sure that it made a good connection.  I continued anyways and powered it on.  The "stuck" key problem had gone away.  While most keys now worked, a seemingly random subset of them didn't do anything on key press, including T, G, B, left shift, tab, command, etc.
>> 
>> I've removed the keyboard again and removed the keys that were still having issues.  There isn't anything obviously afoul with them, aside from there being some dusty/cloudy appearance between the layers of transparent plastic housing the connections to/from the nubs that get depressed, which isn't dramatic different than the appearance surrounding the working keys.
>> 
>> Questions:
>> - Could the behavior be caused by a incomplete connection of the ribbon cable?  Or would that cause boot errors or all-or-none behavior?  Tips on getting that ribbon cable in snugly despite the lack of slack in the cable?
>> - Did I screw up by rinsing it off?  Alternatively, did I not go far enough in my rinse?
>> - Any other tips on what I should do next?  Clearly I can buy a replacement, but I'd like to eliminate the possibility of repair before doing so.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> Jared- 
>> 
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