Spilled something on your laptop? Do this in the next 60 seconds

Water, coffee, wine, a toddler's juice — it happens in a second. What you do in the next minute decides whether this is a clean-up or a new laptop. The liquid itself is rarely what kills a laptop; it is the electricity running through wet components. So the goal is simple: get the power out, and get the liquid out, before anything shorts.

Right now, in this order

1. Unplug the charger. Pull it from the laptop, not the wall, so you are not reaching across the spill.
2. Hold the power button until it switches off. Do not bother saving your work or shutting down properly. Ten seconds of holding the button is safer than thirty seconds of Windows shutting down.
3. Unplug everything else — USB drives, mice, cables.
4. Tip it upside down in a tent shape, screen open, keyboard facing down, on a towel. Let gravity pull the liquid away from the board.
5. Wipe up what you can see with a lint-free cloth. Do not press down on the keys.

If the battery is removable (mostly older laptops), take it out. On modern laptops and MacBooks it isn't, which is exactly why holding the power button off is so important.

What not to do

• Do not turn it back on to "see if it's OK". This is the single biggest mistake. It may well turn on — and short out a few minutes or a few days later as the liquid moves.
• Do not use a hairdryer. Heat can push liquid further inside and warp plastics. Cool, dry air and time are what you want.
• Do not put it in rice. Rice does not draw moisture out of a sealed laptop, and it leaves starch and dust in the ports and fans. It mostly just delays getting help.
• Do not charge it until it has been checked, even if it seems fine.

Water versus coffee, wine and soft drink

Plain water is the best case. If it is dealt with quickly and fully dried, a lot of laptops survive untouched.

Anything with sugar, milk, acid or alcohol is a different story. As it dries, it leaves a sticky, conductive residue on the circuit board that corrodes connections over the following days and weeks. The laptop can work perfectly for a week and then fail. With these liquids, drying it out is not enough — the board needs to be opened and cleaned. The sooner that happens, the less corrosion there is to deal with.

"It still works" — is it fine?

Maybe. Keys that stick, a trackpad that behaves oddly, a battery that suddenly drains fast, or random shutdowns in the days after a spill are all signs residue is at work. If you spilled anything other than water, have it opened and cleaned even if it seems fine now. It is far cheaper to clean a board than to replace one.

Your files

Liquid damage to the laptop does not usually mean liquid damage to your data. On most laptops the drive is separate from the parts that short out, and even when the laptop itself is written off, we can usually recover what is on it. If the files are the part you are worried about, say so when you call — getting them off safely comes first, before anyone tries to power the laptop up. More on that on our data recovery page.

When to call

As soon as you have done the steps above. Liquid damage is one of the few jobs where hours genuinely matter. We will open it, dry and clean the board, check for damage and tell you where it stands before anything else is spent. Our laptop repair service covers Windows laptops and MacBooks, at our Indooroopilly workshop or onsite across Brisbane, at the same flat rate as everything we do.

Related guides

• Laptop won't turn on? Check these six things first — if it has already shut itself off.
• How to back up your computer properly — so the next spill is only a hardware problem.