Well, it happened. I was at Panera in Glastonbury, CT and was actually using my HTC Modem (for some reason the free Panera WiFi link wasn’t working today) and was writing some stuff. I picked up my coffee mug and the bottom edge of the cup hit the laptop screen which tilted the cup and some coffee spilled out onto my laptop! AAAACK. OK, don’t panic, I know what to do here. I shut off the laptop ASAP, unplugged the battery and took out the A/C adapter. You have to do this folks! Its when powered circuits get wet that they fail. If they are not powerwed, things are okay.
So basically, I might have just killed the laptop - it would take about another $399.00 to replace it entirely (provided the upgrades I put in it still work). If I can find another Thinkpad T40. Anyway… I brought it home to clean it up. These things have a ton of screws, probably one of the reasons they have such a durable chassis, so it was a bit of an effort to find them all. I took out the keyboard, palm rest, and the LCD panel. I cleaned it all up, sopped up all the coffee and even wiped a couple things down with a damp cloth. Now, the wait. I will need to wait for at least a week before I turn the thing on - to let all of the parts I missed dry out.
I’ll let you know how that goes. Time to resurrect the ol’ Dell Latitude D800. Hmm, time for XP and TrueCrypt encryption? Sounds like!
May 24th, 2008 at 1:01 pm - Edit
The D800 fired up with one of the RAM upgrades I’d put in the T40 no problem. So its running Win2000 Professional at 1.5GB RAM. The processor in the D800 is actually a Pentium M 1.8GHz (the ThinkPad is a 1.5GHz) and should be faster, but at the moment its a recognizably slower. I’ll see about upgrading to WinXP on the system to see what that looks like. It’s good to know that at least one of my RAM upgrades still works.
May 25th, 2008 at 8:54 pm - Edit
And this old beast runs hot, too!
May 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am - Edit
Strange, it does run faster in WinXP than Win2000. I always viewed Win2000 to be the slimmer operating system. Maybe there is something to that “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP” sticker.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:14 am - Edit
I waited a week, and I’m now happily writing to you from my mighty ThinkPad!
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm - Edit
Sweet.
I think we like thinkpads now eh?
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:48 pm - Edit
Yes, if I buy another Windows laptop (instead of a Mac), it will be a ThinkPad.