What to Do After Spilling Coffee on a Laptop Computer

Accidents happen, and they usually happen in the morning. There's a fairly decent chance that if you're as clumsy as me, you'll eventually drip a bit-or a cup-of coffee onto your laptop computer.

Here are a few tips for a coffee spill on a laptop computer.

First, turn the computer upside down. Drain out all of the coffee as best as you can, but don't shake too hard or you could rattle the hard drive and other components in the computer.

While you're holding the computer upside down, you should turn it off by holding down its power button until it goes to a black screen. Make sure that it isn't plugged in, either. Electricity is a big enemy when you spill coffee onto a laptop, as you might expect, so remove the battery, too and don't try to plug the computer in or restart it until the coffee issue has been completely managed.

Assess the spill. If you spilled a whole cup of coffee onto the laptop, you might have to do a little surgery or get the laptop into a computer repair shop ASAP. If you only spilled a little, you might be alright in letting the computer sit and maybe spraying a little compressed air into the keyboard. Think about the size of the spill and determine which course of action is better; if you spilled coffee over the entire computer and not just one localized portion of it, there's a good chance that you'll need to go further to fully fix the issue.

Taking the computer apart. If you're fairly handy and you want to manually clean the coffee out of your laptop, it's usually not too difficult. Most laptop computers have a panel that hides the screws for the keyboard of the device towards the front of the screen.

Once this is removed, the keyboard can be removed and you can use a bit of isopropyl alcohol (not much) and a clean rag to clean up the spilled coffee. In most cases, cleaning the keyboard will be all that's necessary-there's not a huge chance of the coffee making it past this area of the computer unless it was a tremendous amount of liquid. If your keyboard won't respond once you clean up the computer and restart it, replacing the keyboard will usually solve the issue. You can find replacement keyboards at a variety of computer parts shops online or even eBay.

Computer repair shops. If you're not too handy, you'll want to take the computer into a computer repair shop. Avoid chain rip-offs ("rip-off" is just my opinion, by the way) like Best Buy and find a local computer guy. Be honest about what happened, as they'll quickly figure it out. I used to work at a computer repair place, and a good tech can diagnose just about anything. To keep your price down, bring in a plate of cookies or something with the laptop. This is an old trick to keep a mechanic's rates down, and it works on computer techs, too.

Have any other tips or questions about spilling coffee on a laptop computer? Post below.