Laptop spills revisited

Can you all see that black cloud resting right over my head? I know it's there.

Wednesday night at 8 pm I spilled coffee on my laptop keyboard. Wa-ah! Of course it was on, and before I could get it shut down, it shut off by itself. Dell thoughtfully has a page on what to do if your computer gets wet in its brief manual. I did just what it said, but next day it was no go. Called support and they walked me through everything I'd already done, but with no more success. Then they informed me that that wasn't covered under warranty. Well, I knew that, didn't I? They gave me a number to call for out of warranty repairs, but suggested I wait a few days, just to see if it would run when it was more thoroughly dried. Being without my laptop is like having one hand tied behind my back - but I know I'm lucky to have another computer to use.

Today I took the hard drive to my guru/friend who has an adaptor that will let me hook it up to his machine. I also took my external HD to copy to, but for some reason we couldn't get his computer to recognize it. But I was able to burn most of my data files to a DVD. And as I was packing up all my stuff to come home the laptop HD slipped out of its bag and fell on the floor. We hooked it back up to his machine and it could read and copy from it, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. (This HD was just replaced by Dell last month!)

Oh, and to top things off, just when I was about finished walking on my treadmill this morning, it suddenly quit on me. Then driving to my friend's the cruise control on the car wouldn't work. Did ya' ever have one of them days, boys?

The laptop was only about 6 months old. My friend used to work for the electric company and knows a fair piece about electricity. He thinks there's a short (he called it a "dead short" ??) in the power system. Apparently there's a breaker of some sort in the power adaptor, because the minute you plug it into the computer, the adaptor/power supply goes dead. I'll have to get an estimate. If the repairs are more than half the cost of the system, I'm going to bite the bullet and replace it instead. Think Dell would give me anything for the dead one? They can probably refurbish it for a lot less than I can repair it.

Of course I went back and re-read Jennifer G's thread http://davesgarden.com/t/409663/keyboard Seems to me her daughter was incredibly lucky. My keyboard seems fine. it's the electrical and/ electronics I'm worried about.

I know this doesn't hold a candle to real problems - life, death, health - but I'm still looking for sympathetic ears.