Latitude D800 got watered but it lives!

So I'm over at "The Roach Palace*" (a "project house" that I bought)
with my Latitude D800, laying on the floor and enjoying a glass of ice
water.

Well, the water got knocked over. It was several inches from the
machine, but it made the carpet wet and a few minutes later I got a
STOP error. The Latitude wasn't happy when I powered it up again, with
the screen staying blank and a sad endless beep playing from the front
speakers. I got to thinking bad thoughts about this, even though the
system was sitting "above" the spill on a thick woven rug sitting on
top of the wet carpet.

I don't know how, but water got inside the system around the speaker
and microphone plugs. I pulled all the batteries (main, modular bay
and CMOS/standby), removed many of the bottom expansion access doors,
set it front of a high velocity fan and left it there for an hour. An
hour later, it was still unhappy. It would power on but the power LED
in the display hinge would fade to dark and the screen would go out
halfway through POST.

So I let it sit in front of that fan overnight with the A/C cranked in
that room for dehumidification.

It worked! This morning, the system booted right up and passed Dell
diagnostics.

I'm beginning to think that particular room is bad for laptops. A
Macbook fell off an otherwise sturdy shelf in there and got a
shattered screen.

William

* historical name. The place was filthy when I bought it and full of
bugs. After cleaning it up and bug-bombing the hell out of it, it is
now clean and bug free.
.

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