My 2-year-old and her cousin thought my laptop needed some cleaning while I stepped out to run an errand. The door to my home office was closed, but not locked. When I got back, I was told that my nephew was pouring water with a small bucket onto my less-than-a-year-old ASUS Zenbook while my daughter did the wiping with a towel.
When my mom discovered what had happened, she immediately wiped as much of the water off the laptop as she could.
When I finally got to it, I turned it on (it was on sleep) to see if it still worked. The screen flickered a couple times, but eventually became stable. Upon realizing that the power and whatever water was left in the laptop could fry the motherboard, I immediately turned it off.
I then turned it to one side so the water could drain. I got a couple drops. Afterwards, I blow-dried the laptop using the lowest heat setting, which was warm.
After about ten to fifteen minutes of that, I googled to see what others had done. Apparently, I did the wrong thing twice. I shouldn’t have turned on the power at all. In fact, the first thing to do is to turn the laptop off. Then, take out the battery. For the Zenbook, I didn't know where the battery was, so I didn’t bother.
The proper way to drain the water out of the laptop is to open up the screen as wide as it can go, and lay the keyboard side down on a flat surface.
Blow-drying is fine only if there’s a setting with no heat because that can fry the circuits on the motherboard, so what I did with the warm setting is wrong. Also, you should blow-dry it with the keyboard facing down. After reading that, I found another blow dryer with a cool setting and blow-dried it some more.
Afterwards, lay the laptop back down on the keyboard and let it dry for 3-5 days. I only did three. I was using my ancient Toshiba Satellite as an alternative and just couldn’t bare with its slowness for another day.
My ASUS Zenbook worked flawlessly afterwards, as if nothing had happened. I’m glad because most of the cases that I’ve read during my Google search didn’t end well.
(If you haven't already noticed, that's not an actual image of my laptop.)
