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Repair guides and disassembly information for Apple's Macintosh personal computers.

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spilled diet coke on the keyboard and the pad

My child spilled diet coke on the keboard. At first the keyboarding was working fine,but the pad was working properly. Now the screen doesn't even turn on. Is my Mac pro gone for good?

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Spilled coffee on the keyboard how can I clean the keyboard below?

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The most important thing to keep in mind is that liquid can short out the computer and fry the board, so DO NOT turn it on until you're sure it is 100% dry. This can take a couple days. Also remove the battery, because the battery provides power to the laptop and can also cause problems.

Diet Coke is a corrosive substance, so the longer it stays in the computer, the more damage it can potentially do. If you're comfortable opening the machine up, follow the appropriate iFixit guide for your computer and clean up all signs of the liquid spill with 90% rubbing alcohol and q-tips.

It's possible your logic board has been fried, although it's also possible it will work again once it has completely dried, or after the liquid has been cleaned out as I described. It's also possible that just the DC-in board has been fried (and not the logic board), in which case you can just replace that part, which is a relatively minor expense ($50-$100 for the DC-in board, plus the procedure to swap it out). When you connect the AC adapter to the laptop, what color is the light on the plug, or is there no light? If it is green/amber and behaves normally, that may indicate the logic board has been affected, and if there is no light, that would tend to point toward the DC-in board.

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+ Ralph

Mac

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hard to tell, diet coke is very aggressive

if i understand it right, you have a macbook pro (you only wrote mac pro - but it would only make sense if it is a macbook pro)

if it is a macbook pro - remove the battery NOW and remove the power cord!

you can select on the right side the guide for your computer and disassemble it. use the logicboard guide for that.

get some isopropyl alcohol and a soft paintbrush - clean the parts where you see the fluid residue (sometimes white/greenish but coke damages also leave a sticky brown film on the parts - that would be better removed with destilled water and a different paintbrush)

when everything is clean, if everything looks ok, let it dry (one or two days - no hair dryer!!)

reassemble it and try to start the computer

edit: argh - to slow ;-)

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I used a hair dryer And it came back on within minutes

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Not really! All you did is slow down the corrosion! Coke is corrosive! Over time the metals will be eaten away.

I strongly recommend you get your system to someone who can properly clean the internals.

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@Markus if the hair dryer fixed the problem, given that there is no such thing as a solid corrosive agent. It would take humidity of 100% continually over a span way longer than the shelf life of laptop for it to have any real effect on the main board or anything plugged into it. As long as you can be sure everything is dry, I wouldn’t go to the bother of having a ‘professional’ clean it with IPA and distilled water. That’s more likely make the solid residue of the corrosive liquid do damage where it failed to before, by dissolving into what was the distilled water.

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That being said I wouldn’t have turned it on for a couple of days to make absolutely sure everything had dried.

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