Problems after toddler spilled water on Chromebook

J5CBadvice

Hi, as the title states, my toddler spilled water onto the keyboard of the laptop. After this point the laptop would work but turn itself off after a minute. I went to work pretty much immediately taking it apart to dry the inside. I actually didn’t see much water in there but there was a little. So I put it back together and it still would turn on, work for a minute two and then off. I thought it was done and gave up until a few days later when I turned it on just to see if it would do anything different. To my surprise it worked fine and did not turn off! Until about 24 hours later when it was playing YouTube videos and turned itself off again. This time it won’t turn back on. When I press the power button the blue light flashes for a second but it doesn’t come on. I did charge it up which didn’t help. I also tried the refresh + power button startup which didn’t help. 

Am I correct to assume this is a hardware issue due to the fact that it began directly after water was poured on it? I do have another one just like it that I can use for replacement parts. I just have no clue which part it could be that is malfunctioning! Any help is greatly appreciated. 

billsey

It likely is a hardware issue caused by the water. It is going to be tough to diagnose though since there are so many things that could have gone wrong. The problem is that most water has impurities that make it slightly conductive to electricity. That allows two pins to short to each other and it could be two adjacent pins or two pins that are just near to each other but not adjacent. Compounded by it actually being a bunch of pins instead of just two, and the short being not a complete short, so things can be mostly fried without actually burning. Later when everything is dry the mostly shorted connections can pop and that's when it stops working. More often than not what you end up with is something doesn't work, but there is no direct indication as to why or where the problem lies.

If your other system is identical, ie., the same brand and model with the same build from the manufacturer, you can swap some stuff between them and potentially figure out which piece is the problem, unless the problem involves multiple pieces and the interaction fries the second computer pieces the same way it did with the first. The most likely culprit is going to be the motherboard, since that's the most complex part. What you might do is swap the safest pieces first and leave the MB until last. Which model of Chromebook is it? How old is it? If you let us know what the full model number is (something like CB313-41-xyza) we can try to help narrow it down...