In the last couple of weeks my friend have had two people who came to him regarding the laptop “mechanical” if I may say so problems i.e. not connected with their own failures but with failures caused by a person working on the laptop. The failure reason in both cases was the water that was spilled on the laptop’s keyboard.
In the first case, the impact was light: a couple of keys on the keyboard stopped functioning. The laptop was opened up, the keyboard was cleaned and checked but after putting it all back together the keys still wouldn’t work. The replacement keyboard would have sorted the problem but a customer decided not to go ahead with the keyboard replacement at that moment but instead decided to add an additional USB keyboard and use it for the foreseeable future.
In the second case, much more water was spilled, so the impact was much higher: the computer continued to work but the high-pitched noise on the startup has been informing a user that there was something wrong with some of the laptop components. And a roughly half of all keys on the keyboard wouldn’t work at all too. When my friend opened the laptop, he found that the water has sipped through (it wasn’t the case with the first laptop) and definitely damaged the motherboard. The short-circuit might have occurred at the time so some components of the laptop have probably failed. After finding all this, my friend has returned the laptop to the owner and advised to seek help at the laptop manufacturer service centre because only they can switch the laptop components in order to find out which one has failed and then replace it.
Why have I wrote all this? I just want to point that laptops require greater care than the desktop computers. When water is spilled on the desktop keyboard, the keyboard can be easity changed and the computer itself is never damaged because the computer case is not under the keybord. It is more difficult, more time-consuming and more expensive to repair the laptops because all of them have different structures and configurations, the components cost more and finding the source of a problem takes more time. So if one have opted out of buying a desktop and bought a laptop instead, he or she should take proper care of it when working on it and when not working in order to avoid the problems afterwards:
don’t eat or drink in front of the laptop;
lift and put the laptop down very carefully;
buy a special padded computer bag to carry the laptop around;
don’t use the laptop on the heat, under the direct sun, during the sandstorm, under the rain, in the bathroom, in the freezing temperature and in all other conditions when the damage can be caused to the laptop;
when not working with the laptop, store it in the safe place where no one can damage it by accident.
Following the simple rules above will ensure the long life of the laptop computer free from the failures caused computer users themselves.
