Spilled a drink on your laptop? What to do in the first ten minutes

Right now: cut the power

Electricity is what turns a wet laptop into a damaged one, so getting the power off comes before anything else — before you save your work, and before you go looking for a towel.

• Unplug the charger — pull it from the wall or the laptop, keeping your hands away from any pooled liquid
• Force it off — hold the power button for about 10 seconds until the screen goes dark — do not wait for a normal shut-down
• Disconnect everything — USB drives, docks, mice and cables — anything that could carry power or trap liquid
• Removable battery? — on older laptops with a clip-out battery, take it out; on modern laptops and every MacBook it is internal, so the force-off is enough

Next: get the liquid out

With the power off, the job is to let liquid drain away from the board instead of soaking further in. Gravity is your friend; heat and shaking are not.

• Open it and turn it over — open the lid as far as it will safely go and stand it upside down like a tent, keyboard facing down, so liquid drains out of the keys
• Blot, do not wipe — dab visible liquid with a lint-free cloth or paper towel; wiping spreads it across the keyboard and into more gaps
• Do not shake it — shaking pushes liquid sideways into places it had not reached
• Leave it somewhere dry and airy — a fan blowing across it at room temperature is fine; direct heat is not

What not to do

Most of the folk remedies for a wet laptop either do nothing or actively make the damage worse. These are the ones we see most often on the bench.

• Turning it on to "check" — the single most damaging thing you can do — powering a wet board is what causes the short circuits; wait, even if it seems dry
• Rice — it does not draw liquid out of a sealed laptop, and the dust and grains end up in the ports and fans
• Hair dryers and heaters — heat can warp parts and drives liquid deeper inside; it also dries sugary drinks into a sticky residue right on the board
• Charging it overnight — the charger feeds power straight into the circuits you are trying to keep dead

Why the drink matters

Plain water is the kindest spill. Sugary drinks, coffee with milk, juice, wine and beer leave sticky, conductive residue that keeps corroding the board long after the liquid has dried — which is why a laptop can seem fine for a week and then fail. Even a clean water spill can carry minerals that corrode over time. If anything other than a small splash of water reached the inside, the safe assumption is that it needs to be opened and cleaned, not just dried.

When to get it looked at

Many spills are survivable, but the survivors are usually the ones cleaned properly inside rather than the ones that happened to dry out. Opening the machine, cleaning residue off the board and checking for corrosion is a bench job, and the sooner it happens the better the odds.

• Anything sugary, milky or alcoholic — residue keeps working on the board even after it dries — get it opened and cleaned
• More than a splash — if liquid went through the keyboard, assume it reached the board underneath
• Symptoms after drying — sticky or dead keys, a trackpad that misbehaves, flickering, or not charging all point at liquid inside
• Files you cannot lose — tell us first — we can prioritise getting the data off before anything else is attempted

See also: Data recovery: what to do first · Repair or replace a MacBook?