A learning from mishap when water bottle was kept in same briefcase as Mac Air Laptop (in flight)
An Indian correspondent wrote the following to me, and was more than willing to share it publicly:
On my flight back from London a few days ago, as so often I put a small bottle of water into the briefcase in which my Mac Air was sitting in its own pocket. Got out of the 'plane in Mumbai and discovered the water had leaked out (cap not properly screwed? bottle cracked with the change in pressure?). In the hotel, took out the Mac and left it to dry overnight. Turned it on the next morning and it did, partially, before the display faded out. A few more tries, but with reducing success each time.
The Mac Service people looked at it yesterday and said the mother board was damaged beyond repair. (Inside a Mac Air, there's a largely sealed mother board and a display, very little else). If I was willing to pay over half the cost of a new Mac Air, they would replace the motherboard and then be able to tell me if the display was working.
Repair clearly not an option. After a sleepless night, bought a new Mac Air (faster processor than yours, they told me cheerfully). Now to set it up and see what I can retrieve from cloud storage (Dropbox etc.).
I should of course have powered off the laptop before the flight, rather than just shutting the lid as I have done thousands of times. And people have suggested that I should not have tried to restart a damp laptop but put it in a sealed box/bag with a lot of dry uncooked rice for a week or so.
Moral: DON'T put water anywhere near a laptop. If it gets in, you can try and wipe it off or hope it will dry out, but you'll have to be very, very lucky to have that work.
I certainly did not know how vulnerable a laptop was to moisture or the best way to deal with a damp laptop.
It may even be good to state some general guidelines:
1. Always completely power off your laptop when travelling. If you need to use it during a flight or a train journey, remember to power it off again after use.
2. Keep your laptop well away from sources of water and moisture: e.g. cups of liquid, bottles and rain.
3. If your laptop does get wet, do NOT power it up. Put it into a sealed container (e.g. a sealable plastic bag) with plenty of dry rice or newspaper and leave it unopened for several days, even up to a week.
4. Make sure all your important files are backed up: on electronic storage, on a CD or in the cloud. The latter is easiest, especially as between Google Drive, Outlook, Dropbox and various other apps, you can easily get 20-30GB of free storage.
By the way, the Mac Air has no hard disk, only solid-state flash memory. That allows them to make the laptop very compact and light. It also increases the time between charges to 12 hours. Of course, there is no CD drive either.
I have been able to recover the important files that were saved on Dropbox. I also got back some photographs but many are lost. Anything that I mailed to others using Gmail is recoverable. So, overall, it seems so far that there was limited loss of files. On the other hand, I have gained some wisdom and know now not to tempt fate by not powering off my laptop when travelling!
On my flight back from London a few days ago, as so often I put a small bottle of water into the briefcase in which my Mac Air was sitting in its own pocket. Got out of the 'plane in Mumbai and discovered the water had leaked out (cap not properly screwed? bottle cracked with the change in pressure?). In the hotel, took out the Mac and left it to dry overnight. Turned it on the next morning and it did, partially, before the display faded out. A few more tries, but with reducing success each time.
The Mac Service people looked at it yesterday and said the mother board was damaged beyond repair. (Inside a Mac Air, there's a largely sealed mother board and a display, very little else). If I was willing to pay over half the cost of a new Mac Air, they would replace the motherboard and then be able to tell me if the display was working.
Repair clearly not an option. After a sleepless night, bought a new Mac Air (faster processor than yours, they told me cheerfully). Now to set it up and see what I can retrieve from cloud storage (Dropbox etc.).
I should of course have powered off the laptop before the flight, rather than just shutting the lid as I have done thousands of times. And people have suggested that I should not have tried to restart a damp laptop but put it in a sealed box/bag with a lot of dry uncooked rice for a week or so.
Moral: DON'T put water anywhere near a laptop. If it gets in, you can try and wipe it off or hope it will dry out, but you'll have to be very, very lucky to have that work.
[Ravi (I) wrote back:
Very sorry to hear about water getting into your laptop and damaging it beyond feasible repair. I empathize with your sleepless night, as I know from some experiences in the past, how disturbing an event the regular computer suddenly stopping to function can be. Fortunately, so far, if I recall correctly, I have been able to recover from such stoppages.
But many times, I have had to switch over to a new OS or a few times, a new computer, and so have been through the routine of transferring my data (sometimes from a backup) many times.
BTW did you check with the Mac Service people about only recovering data from the hard disk of the laptop? Or perhaps you have all the data on your (cloud) backup and so that is not necessary?
All the best with getting all your data on your new Mac Air, and with your new Mac Air itself.
Noted the moral of the story. BTW I keep telling my maid when she is wiping the floor near my desktop computer (which is on the floor) that water is the enemy (shatru in Telugu, I believe) of the computer and that she should not swipe the part of the floor near the computer with the mop. Sometimes, she forgets while in her routine of mopping away, and I have to rather pointedly remind her about it!]The correspondent added the following in his response:
I certainly did not know how vulnerable a laptop was to moisture or the best way to deal with a damp laptop.
It may even be good to state some general guidelines:
1. Always completely power off your laptop when travelling. If you need to use it during a flight or a train journey, remember to power it off again after use.
2. Keep your laptop well away from sources of water and moisture: e.g. cups of liquid, bottles and rain.
3. If your laptop does get wet, do NOT power it up. Put it into a sealed container (e.g. a sealable plastic bag) with plenty of dry rice or newspaper and leave it unopened for several days, even up to a week.
4. Make sure all your important files are backed up: on electronic storage, on a CD or in the cloud. The latter is easiest, especially as between Google Drive, Outlook, Dropbox and various other apps, you can easily get 20-30GB of free storage.
By the way, the Mac Air has no hard disk, only solid-state flash memory. That allows them to make the laptop very compact and light. It also increases the time between charges to 12 hours. Of course, there is no CD drive either.
I have been able to recover the important files that were saved on Dropbox. I also got back some photographs but many are lost. Anything that I mailed to others using Gmail is recoverable. So, overall, it seems so far that there was limited loss of files. On the other hand, I have gained some wisdom and know now not to tempt fate by not powering off my laptop when travelling!
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