Feb 25

What to do if your laptop gets thirsty

Tag: Infrastructure, Other — February 25, 2010 @ 12:17 pm
Author:

Mark Becker

For a more in-depth bio and list of my areas of expertise, take a look at http://www.cdh.com.

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Articles by Mark Becker

My laptop decided it was thirsty last week. Luckily I got it cleaned up, unplugged and pulled the battery. I also got some good advice from a colleague that I thought I would share:

  • Pull the keyboard and clean it up asap
  • Put the system in a sealed bag with 3 cups of rice overnight to pull out the moisture
  • Reattach the keyboard – In my case, the keyboard was dead, so I attached a USB keyboard and started up the system. (Hopefully you’ll have better luck with the keyboard!)
  • Go into BIOS and run a full diagnostics – So far so good for me…except for the dead keyboard.
  • Start up the system – My system booted to the point of Windows loading and stopped at loading the CLASSPNP.SYS driver. I used Safe Mode, but was unsuccessful after several tries. I pulled the drive and hooked it up to an external SATA chassis and connected it to a working laptop. It read the drive just fine, so jumped on the opportunity to get another backup of my laptop. (I backed it up the previous week, but noticed I was not backing up everything.) I installed a different drive that had Windows 7 running. It, too, stopped at the same CLASSPNP.SYS driver, so I thought I might have a problem with the system board.
  • Contact your computer’s technical support – I ended up finding out I had Complete Care! They took care of everything including a new system board, keyboard, palm rest assembly and a technician. Had that come out of my pocket, it would have been $1,500 worth of parts and labor!

So my keyboard arrived two days ago, and I thought to myself, why not try the keyboard and see if the OS will get past the CLASSPNP.SYS. Sure enough everything boots up and works great. Until it’s plugged in that is…then the laptop freezes solid and I have to power off completely.

So while the new keyboard solved my boot problem, I am thinking that I still need to replace the system board, etc. And the tech thinks so too – so bring it on!

Lessons Learned:

  • Don’t let your laptop drink – unless you have Complete Care!
  • Backup your important files! And make sure you are backing up what you think you are backing up… You might want to come up with a nice script that backs your files up on a schedule.
  • Have a spare laptop “ready-to-roll” just in case.
  • Do most of your work on web-based systems like SharePoint, Outlook web access, Salesforce, and Citrix Nfuse. Luckily we do, so even without a system, I am able to do just about everything!

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