Diagnostics
Laptop liquid damage: the first ten minutes decide everything
Liquid rarely kills a laptop instantly. What kills it is corrosion over the following days, and switching it back on too early.
Laptop liquid damage is one of the few faults where your response matters more than our repair. Machines that arrive quickly and were never switched back on have a genuinely good survival rate.
Do these four things immediately
One. Hold the power button down until it switches off. Do not shut down normally, because that takes too long while current is still flowing.
Two. Unplug the charger. If the battery is removable, take it out.
Three. Turn the laptop upside down, opened like a tent, on a towel. This lets liquid drain away from the board instead of soaking further in.
Four. Leave it that way and bring it in. Do not test whether it still works.
Why switching it on is the real damage
On an unpowered board, liquid corrodes slowly. On a powered board it shorts circuits at once, and that destroys components which were fine a moment earlier.
So the single most expensive thing people do after a spill is press the power button to see whether it survived. Frequently it had, until that moment.
Rice does not work
Rice absorbs a little ambient moisture from the air. It does not reach liquid trapped under components, and it does nothing at all about corrosion, which is a chemical process rather than a wet one.
Worse, rice dust gets into ports and fans. Time spent waiting for rice to work is time corrosion spends spreading across the board.
What the liquid was matters
Plain water is the best case, because it evaporates and leaves relatively little behind. Tea, coffee and anything sweet or fizzy are considerably worse, since sugar and acids stay on the board and keep attacking it.
Salt water is the most aggressive of all. Whatever it was, tell us, because it changes how we clean the board.
What a proper recovery involves
We open the machine, lift out the board, and clean the residue off properly instead of letting it dry. Then we test the power rails before we try switching it on.
Where components have already corroded, we replace them one by one. Our Lenovo laptop repair page describes that approach, and it applies to every brand we handle.
If the spill reached the drive, data recovery comes first, before we attempt anything else.
Spilled something just now?
Switch it off, do not test it, and bring it straight in.