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Repair guides, support, and troubleshooting information for MacBook Air models with 11-inch displays.

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I Got Water Damage And Now Have Bad Lag

So i spilled just a little bit of water on my macbook (only in the keyboard). The first thing I did was unplug from my power source and powered down, then flipped it upside down over a towel and put a fan on it. Once i was 100% sure it was dry, i powered it on, no problems until i get my password in.

It turned out that I had INSANE amounts of lag, given that before the mac was VERY fast, i looked at the widget, iStat Nano, and it said that it was running ~88% CPU when Ive never seen it go higher than 12%.

I decided to try a few things such as,

1.) Reboot

2.) Check the memory availability on my hard drive (i had 36GB/~60GB)

3.) Erase my disk and Re-install Lion

None have worked,

I would like to know whats wrong with this Computer,

Its fully functional besides this lag problem. Thanks for reading this and get back to me as soon as possible, much appreciated.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Chosen Solution

What's wrong is water damage. Electrons and water don't play well together. Putting a fan on it likely just blew the water into places it wasn't. Putting a towel on it doesn't dry the inside, using a desiccant does, it takes more than minutes or hours (days). Run the hardware test, you've probably damaged a heat/fan sensor which is causing the software to put the CPU in to overuse to slow it down (cooling it). Reinstalling software is not a hardware fix.

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4 Comments:

i ran the hardware test and it said i had 2GB of memory and i should have 51 like it says when i click get info on my hard drive.

im assuming i shorted out a ram card or part(?) of my ssd

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RAM=Memory (aside from VMEM) it has nothing to do with HD or SSD size/space. I don't think you could damage part of an SSD, like a light bulb it's an all or nothing proposition. You can find out more about RAM and other components using Utilities->System Profiler(Information)

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so half my ram is gone because my macbook air had 4GB memory?

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IDK - I guess you could have blown out one 2GB chip.

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