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Put Java on Laptop; System Crashed

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by TonyPSchaefer, Mar 9, 2006.

  1. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    I just wanted to share this with you all because I know you will appreciate it.

    Tuesday morning, while reaching for my phone, I bumped my freshly-brewed, to-the-rim coffee mug. It promptly tilted in the direction of my laptop. Before I had the chance to freeze space and time, that destructive pair of gravity and inertia tag-teamed my caffeinated ambrosia pushing it - tsunami-like - across my laptop keyboard. From [Caps Lock] to [Backspace], my keyboard was quickly dowsed in about 6 -8 ounces of coffee, cream, and sugar. There was a split-second in which I anticipated a quick shut-down but in the time it took my hand to reach for the power button, the computer literally moaned, gargled, and died. It has not since regained consciousness.

    I carried it - more like dangled - dripping back to the IT guy who cleared off some space on a work desk. Choking back tears of laughter, he helped me disassemble the entire case, remove all components, blow dry, wipe, and clean as much as we could before reassembly. All to no avail.

    My manager was actually pretty cool about the whole thing. To quote him, "that's the kind of things that you hope to be able to laugh at someone else about but it's not as funny when you do it."

    The hard drive popped right out and went right into a loaner; my actual downtime was rather minimal all things considering.

    So there you have it. I have to wait about 8 - 10 days for my new laptop to come in. In case you're wondering if I'm replacing a piece of crap with something a hundred times better, nope. I killed a one year old Dell D600 1.86GHz 30Gb and am getting a D610 1.86GHZ 30GB.

    Oh yeah, about the "installed Java" remark, that moaner is compliments of FlareAK who made that quip via AIM.
     
    #1 TonyPSchaefer, Mar 9, 2006
  2. maggieddd

    maggieddd Senior Member

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    and all this time I was under the impression that you are retired :rolleyes:
     
    #2 maggieddd, Mar 9, 2006
  3. jeneric

    jeneric New Member

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    Ah, my Dell D600 feels your pain.

    Just curious, as long as you're sharing, if you're using the screen at your desk (as a 2nd monitor?), shouldn't it be elevated; and if you're not, shouldn't it be closed? I'm really not throwing stones, I have plenty of glass houses (whatever that means).
     
    #3 jeneric, Mar 9, 2006
  4. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    Maggieddd;
    Yeah, I wish! At 35 years, I still have about 20 years of work before I can begin thinking about retiring. That's right, my goal is financial independence by 55 and a whole bunch of frozen drinks on a warm beach.

    You are correct. But I use the docking station to plug the second monitor into. I found it to be more of a hassle to figure out how to elevate the docking station and laptop to a height level to the momitor than to simply deal with the height difference. And that, of course, leaves me keyboard exposed.
     
    #4 TonyPSchaefer, Mar 9, 2006
  5. Danny

    Danny Admin/Founder
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    I couldn't help but laugh, Tony. I'm surprised my keyboard in college made it all the way through with me (I retired it last year after 7 years of service). I think those keys actually drank more alcohol than I did some nights...

    The D610 is a real POS unless it's suped up with memory. I can only run about 2 10MB Excel files at a time on mine until it slows down to a crawl.
     
    #5 Danny, Mar 9, 2006
  6. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    Well then it's going to really CHOKE on a few of my expense reports! :lol:
     
    #6 TonyPSchaefer, Mar 9, 2006
  7. tunabreath

    tunabreath New Member

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    You might want to try turning the laptop on again. A laptop that fails to boot despite one's best efforts at drying it out after spilling a beverage spilled on it will sometimes boot several hours later after it's had time to completely dry out. I'd, uh, rather not say how I know this. :)

    If you do manage to get it to boot, it would probably be a good idea to do backups right away.
     
    #7 tunabreath, Mar 10, 2006
  8. mehrenst

    mehrenst Member

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    Well, its way too late now but the best thing you can do when something like that happens is to quickly disassemble it and then pour lots of club soda over it. Water is okay but the minerals in water leave deposits. Club soda has an affinity for sugar so it will flush the sugar away along with the coffee and cream. Also, because if the carbonation club soda will clean things better. Once you have it flushed with club soda then you can flush it again with distilled water and then put the bits and pieces in a very low temperature oven (preferrably under 100F). You can use a hair dryer but be careful of the spot temperatures.

    I've had to do this a couple of time with front panel circuit boards from video recorders and editors. Usually you can recover the system but if the initial dousing caused something to cook then you're probably screwed. :(
     
    #8 mehrenst, Mar 10, 2006
  9. jpeachman

    jpeachman Junior Member

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    Ah, so you're replacing a piece of last year's crap with a piece of this year's crap! :p

    I work in IT. Trust me, you're not alone in sharing your beverage with your computer! And tunabreath is right; once everything is thoroughly dried out, there's a fair chance it will still work. But you may still prefer some fresh crap to play with! Eeeewwwww...that just doesn't sound right!
     
    #9 jpeachman, Mar 10, 2006
  10. Trevor

    Trevor Member

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    You really got me with that one. As a techie, I assumed that you installed the Sun Java Runtime Environment or the SDK and it caused your system to crash.

    I experience more people bringing back laptops with cracked screens than spills.
     
    #10 Trevor, Mar 10, 2006
  11. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    Thanks for the commisery.

    1) It still will not boot. Current working theory is the power supply shorting out. I have to admit that I don't care much. I'm writing it off and getting a new one. If I were at home, I'd spend countless hours trying to figure it out. No such attachment here.

    2) There is no reason to back up since I've removed the hard drive and placed it in a loaner computer to keep working.
     
    #11 TonyPSchaefer, Mar 10, 2006
  12. hycamguy07

    hycamguy07 New Member

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    WOW,

    I did a traffic stop the other day, got back into my squad anddropped the coke bottle i was drinking.. I picked it up looked at it then proceeded to twist off the top.. (you see where this is going) then fzzzzzzzztttt it exploded with a vengance!
    all that coke sprying all over the front seat, windshield, radios, computer, ect.
    and of course uniform.... need less to say they did fix the readios and the comuter and a trip the the concrete hotel the trustees had the stickies cleaned out, however Im still finding traces here and there... :(
     
    #12 hycamguy07, Mar 10, 2006
  13. parrot_lady

    parrot_lady Member

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    The very first day I had my laptop Tony I took it into the bird room and was enjoying typing a paper in there UNTIL my dove decided to take a bath and fling water into the keyboard.

    It died in the same way yours did, only the company was kind enough to replace it for me free of charge.

    Amy
     
    #13 parrot_lady, Mar 12, 2006
  14. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    I started reading that and my first thought wasn't that the dove was going to take a bath to damage your computer. Because when a sentence starts with a dove as the subject, the verb is usually a little more, uh, messy.
     
    #14 TonyPSchaefer, Mar 12, 2006
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