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Model A1297 Unibody: Early 2009, Mid 2009, Mid 2010, Early 2011 & Late 2011

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All caps after water spill

Dumped some water on keyboard 6 days ago. Opened back of Macbook and allowed it to air-dry for 6 days.

Removed RAM, wiped contacts with 91% isopropanol, air dried, reinstalled RAM.

Boots fine except that all keys appear to be in caps lock mode (letters are in caps, numbers show alternative value typing numbers from MBP keyboard is not possible). I wonder if I hit some esoteric key combination during the frantic attempt to shut down after the spill. External keyboard works fine for upper and lowercase.

Removed RAM stick to defeat firmware password. MBP will not do PRAM reset, even after starting from installation disk, removing firmware password. Will not do an O-F-CMD-CTL reboot, or single user reboot, or verbose reboot.

Am preparing to do a teardown to double check everything.

SUCCESS! After disassembling and removing the motherboard, lifting the keyboard membrane a little, and air-drying for a couple more days, it now works fine.

Answer this question I have this problem too

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I think your keyboard was damaged in the spill. Fluid tends to creep into the plastic sheets which i call the "active layer" of a KB. All sort of weird things can happen then, from failed keys to permanetely pressend ones.

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+ agreed. Remember you can only zap the PRAM once after a RAM change, after that it locks up again.

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Is there a guide for getting into the keyboard membranes for cleaning from inside?

I have problems with permanently pressed alt and shift key after spill. All work with external keyboard. But i am hesitating to take it all apart withput guide. (cleaning keys from above dodnt help.)

Are there spare keyboards for sale if a cleaning fails?

Do i really need to do anything about resetting PRAM or something?

Thanks for help!

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Please ask your own question.

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