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A colleague has a Dell Latitude E 6500. He spilled hot water on the keyboard/trackpad area.

He took the battery out quickly (without turning the laptop off first). After drying it out for 10 minutes, he put the battery back in and tried turning it back on.

The num lock, caps lock and scroll lock lights flashed for a while, and are now on permanently. There is no other response from the laptop: no sound, nothing on the screen.

Any idea if the laptop is quickly salvageable?

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Is the laptop on a network, can you ping it from another machine?

Do you hear the fan turning?

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No fan noise — it was on a wifi network, but unfortunately none of us have the details for that network, so we can’t try pinging. The lights are no longer activating, so we reckon the water killed it :( – Paul D. Waite Feb 9 '10 at 12:25
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I'm inclined to agree, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the data is lost, there are loads of places that will recover hard drives, but it's worth trying to plug the drive into another machine if you can?...And if it not, then try a data recovery place, a quick google should turn up someone who can help, best of luck! – James B Feb 9 '10 at 12:37
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Yea, the hard drive is probably still salvagable, but it sounds like the spilled water toasted the motherboard. For electronics that get wet, though, I would wait a lot longer than 10 minutes. Give it a day or two to thoroughly dry out then try booting it again. Stranger things have happened to wet electronics. – BBlake Feb 9 '10 at 14:33
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Yeah, personally I would have waited a bit longer before trying to reboot too. Tricky though, we’re working in foreign lands, no spare laptops around. Definitely worth trying to extract the hard drive, he had some stuff saved locally. – Paul D. Waite Feb 10 '10 at 6:44
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