Computer's worst enemy: Wine

Sounds like a problem with rookie wine drinkers -- I think that with years of intensive practice a person can handle both a glass and a keyboard.

Mike P (who is finishing the remnants of dinner's St Joseph as he types)

Well, that's the issue right there. Despite being popular, notebooks are really actually specialized appliances. You pay a premium for a compact, integrated package.

At home, I rarely type on a notebook. Ordinary computers with ordinary $10 USB keyboards are what I drink wine or coffee at.

A perfectly useful machine for Internet surfing is about $500 *brand new* these days. No reason not to have one if you're gonna trash a notebook otherwise. Spill a drink into a keyboard, and $10 later (maybe $25) you have a new keyboard.

Dana

Anyone remember a movie from the 80s called "Electric Dreams"? Guy spills champagne in his computer and it more or less comes to life, eventually trying to take away the guys girlfriend. Fluff but fun.

Dave

Salut/Hi Dana H. Myers,

le/on Sun, 06 Mar 2005 21:40:18 -0800, tu disais/you said:-

Exactly, and if you're going to spill coffee over your keyboard, by laughing explosively over some item in afw, then you need a wireless USB keyboard with your portable, so you just trash your $20 keyboard!

snip

This only happens with Chateau de Fried Motherboard.

Initially, the subject made me think this was an OT anti-Linux rant! Wine is a Linux Windows emulator and I can see Microsoft not liking it (g).

Salut/Hi James Silverton,

Hair splitting time.

le/on Mon, 7 Mar 2005 08:34:58 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

Err.... WINE is an acronym. W - ine I - s N - ot an E - mulator

Smug grin.

As you say! I've never actually used the capitalized version tho' I have a certain familiarity with the lower case one!

Jim.

repair job.

Indeed, don't - they might revoke your computer license.

Dan-O

I should think that a sugar-loaded soft drink spilled on a keyboard would be as destructive as wine. The keyboaed would have to be taken apart to clean out the sticky residue.

But this problem pales on comparison to what some small children have done to VCRs. They see adults inserting things into the VCR, so monkey see - monkey do. Quite a few VCRs have had a variety of foreign objects, including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pushed into the tape slot by small children. The wife of a distant relative just stopped her small children in time. They had put the family cat in the clothes dryer and were trying to figure out how to start it.

Reply to snipped-for-privacy@cwdjr.net .

I've never tried it myself, but I'm told by people I respect that if such a thing happens, you should soak the keyboard in a bathbub of water, then let it dry.

It sounds weird to me too, but considering how low the price of a keyboard is, and the difficulty of taking it apart, if it happened to me, I'd try it.

That should probably work, Ken, but in times past (when keyboards were considerably more expensive) remediation from coffee and soft drink spills (no wine in the workplace, please!) was carried out with supercritical CO2, otherwise known in the coffee biz as the "Swiss water process." Since most households aren't equipped with supercritical CO2 production, soaking in water might be the most practical solution -- but I'd use distilled water to make sure that no salt deposits were left in the keyboard and dry the thing for a week before putting any current through it.

Mark Lipton

I have to admit that this happened to me! A little white wine splashed on my Powerbook and with a puff of smoke it died! Macs seem particularly sensitive to this! I have spilled all kinds of things on my Dell laptop with no ill effects. I am going to say it is a design flaw!

Dimitri

Actually many remote controls and keyboards are not too difficult to take apart and clean. It just takes considerable time. Even if you do not spill liquids in remotes and keyboards, their action sometimes becomes erratic with time. I must have cleaned 5 or 6. Some were old remotes that could not be replaced easily. I have one remote that is over 30 years old and attaches to an open reel tape recoder via a cable. The most difficult thing often is finding out how to unsnap and unscrew the cases. If you have to hire this done, it usually is not cost effective unless you have a very expensive control or one that can not be replaced. The technique for cleaning varies with the type of control. Some people, especially those who have small children, keep their remotes in plastic Ziploc bags. Most controls work well in the bag. This might also work when you have a party where some drink too much wine - not members of this group, of course :-) .

Reply to snipped-for-privacy@cwdjr.net .

splashed on

The Mac that I had was designed to dissapate heat through the keyboard so it was virtually "open" underneath the keyboard. The design was intended to make the Mac thinner since it didn't need a fan or motor to deal with the heat build up from the power transformer. Good idea-bad design.

At one time, I knew a guy who "cleaned" his PC keyboard by taking it into the shower with him. Then, he put it out in the sun to dry. (Sun is mighty scarce here in the NE US right now!)

Dan-O (never tried it - not an endorsement!)

Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but the biggest problem that I have experienced when mixing wine and computers is what I write, as all of the wine has been effectively been poured safely into me! I've now taken to doing TN's in the word processor, and then editing it (if I can make sense of it, especially near the end of the notes) before I post it.

Hunt

Hi Mark,

This is one of the most unplausible co2 applications ever, however I do have the equipment available here so I could try something. My I-book touchpad works bad and if it curable by putting it in a autoclave and pressure it up to 200 bar would help that would be amazing. Possibly all rubber parts will swell and foam when depressurising however, making up for a nice piece of art........ I do have an old notebook somewhere that could be victimised!!

Hubert