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Buy a desktop... spill all the water you want on your keyboards, only $20 a shot...

Take out the battery, remove the bottom cover and sit it over a heat vent for a day or two. Don't use a blowdryer - too hot.
Doesn't work for spilled rye&cokes or chocolate milk... got half dozen of those accidents in my parts bin.

   

Buy a desktop... spill all the water you want on your keyboards, only $20 a shot...

Take out the battery, remove the bottom cover and sit it over a heat vent for a day or two. Don't use a blowdryer - too hot.
Doesn't work for spilled rye&cokes or chocolate milk... got half dozen of those accidents in my parts bin.

   

^^ What they say. Clean water isn't bad for a computer. Dirty water + electricity is very bad!

   

I have a $3000 Macbook right beside me. Somebody dumped their vodka & orange while Facebooking pissed. One of those send to Mac and shell out whatever the hell they fucking want you idiot cuz its worth $3000 explanations to give someone who'd complain about the cost of fixing his Ferrari cuz he only had a couple before he hit a tree.
Know he'll expect for that $25 it should be fixed, not just diagnosed.

   

Well tired old Hal is running on all two cylinders again like a boss.

   

In the early 1990s, I fixed a lot of keyboards for desktop computers. Coffee with sugar spilled into them. I dismantled the keyboard, and sopped up the coffee with a paper towel. Stuck the paper towel between keys to sop up everything. And cleaned everything with isopropyl alcohol. The key is to get everything. Keyboards worked every time.

Cleaned a laptop once that had a beer dumped into it. Again, unplugged and removed the battery immediately. Dismantled the laptop right there, as soon as the beer was spilled, before it dried. Cleaned everything with a paper towel, and clean with isopropyl. The first time I reassembled, it didn't work. Had to dismantle a second time, find where the beer was that I missed. The second time it started perfectly.

Drinks with sugar are the worst, the sugar sticks to everything. Clean water will evaporate, but sugar will short your electronics.

Modern laptops are more tricky. Back then the mechanism for each key was enclosed in raised plastic, so liquid wouldn't flow into the key mechanism. As long as you kept the keyboard flat, just stick a paper towel between keys to sop up everything. Modern laptops don't have that, so liquids get right in. And surface tension tends to cause the liquid to stay there. Sugary drinks like orange juice will dry onto the metal contacts, shorting out keys. One person I volunteer with once brought a laptop to me, whatever was spilled had dried. I wasn't able to fix it. Another volunteer soaked the keyboard in a bath of isopropyl; he used a container just barely big enough for the keyboard, and filled it until the isopropyl was above the keyboard. Let it soak for hours. When it dried, the keyboard still didn't work. That laptop is now sitting in a recycle pile. Clean right away, before the liquid dries.

   

Got a question for all the smart people here.

For the last little while, whenever I turn my PC on from sleep mode it takes a good long while before its responsive. The screen comes on and I can move my cursor, but I can't do anything else.

So I figured I must have downloaded too much crap, so I wiped the drive the other day. And it still does it. I've looked the problem up online and have yet to find a solution that applies or works.

So now I'm perplexed as to what to do. My first inclinations now are to either upgrade my RAM and/or switch to an SSD. Any suggestions?

   

Disable sleep mode. Power settings Hard drive NEVER sleep.
But first - get the SSD. 250GBs are dirt cheap and that's all you need on a laptop.

   

This possible fix is based on nothing more than the fact that more or less the same thing you describe happened to me.

I'm pretty sure I reset the time at which sleep mode clicks on automatically. Can't remember how. Just gave it more time is what I remember.

Also I had been just clicking it into sleep mode before I went to bed. Stopped doing that and started turning it off then turning it on in the morning.

Eventually the sleep mode problem just vanished on its own. I can click it into sleep mode anytime I want now. I rarely do though.

   

In order to 'sleep', your computer will save everything in RAM to disk. When it wakes, it will loading it all back into RAM. While on disk, it can get corrupted, and when it gets sent back, it can get corrupted. Checking and fixing the corruption takes time, so the more you put it in 'sleep' the longer the checks take.

Reboot it, or shut it down if you aren't going to use it for a few hours. It'll be faster next time.

And don't bother to upgrade. Many older laptops can't make good use of newer SSDs, and finding RAM for an old laptop is a crapshoot. I saw some refurbished HP Elitebook 830 and 840 series notebooks on Newegg for $300-$400. It's what I'm using right now. Very snappy, 8Gb RAM, and an NVme SSD that does not disappoint. (And Fedora 30 that makes me smile. )

   

Just for clarification, i don’t have have a laptop. I have a pc which is maybe three years old and still runs really well apart from this weirdness.

   

So my PSU nuked my Video card on friday.


So I think I need to replace the PSU as well (obviously) as the GPU.

   

Principal is still the same, but RAM is easier to find.



Minimum. As a Computer Engineer, I can tell you that if the PSU failed and took out the GPU (which is should be designed not to do) then you can't trust most of the parts in your computer.

Power surges have a certain randomness that just defies troubleshooting. Replacing the fried parts might work, but also you may be saddled with random other problems that will creep in over the coming weeks and months. I'd replace it all.

And, get an external drive caddy to put your old HDD into, so you can get your data back.

   

I was running the computer off of the IGPU and all seemed fine, for now I'm trying to scrape enough money to get those two things fixed. I simply can't afford a major rebuild until next year.

   

Do what you gotta do. Just back your important stuff up. No guarantees it won't happen again.

   

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