Wine+MacBook=no fun

My drunk roommate decided that she hadn’t had enough wine so she leaned forward and attempted to grab her glass that was still half full from the table we were sitting around and just as I had imagined it happening, it happened. I watched red wine fly through the air and land right on my MacBook! There’s not much more devastating than seeing wine start to seep through the gaps in the keys on your $1500 (in October 2008) investment.

Fortunately, by nature, I’m not a person that panics and I’ve been through a similar situation with electronics when I was pushed into a swimming pool holding two cell phones. Anyway, because of this, the first thing I did was turn off the computer by holding the power button. I was smart enough to NOT push any of the wet keys for fear of shorting something out.

Right afterward, I removed the battery and began my decent into the computer’s internals in hopes of cleaning out every drop of wine. I was up until 3am removing many, many, many tiny screws to open this bad boy up. For those who have ever taken apart one of those new aluminum MacBooks, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s the gallery of pictures during the cleaning process.

I knew there was no way to get all the wine out by simply blowing air into the keyboard, so I had to completely submerge it in water by washing it in the sink. After I washed all the layers of the keyboard in water, I blew them dry to get the majority of the water off and then let them dry for 1 more day.

Meanwhile, I washed off everything else that got wine on it and when I was at work the next day, I bought some Monster screen cleaner and I must stop and tell you that that stuff is amazing!! If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d wash my car with it!

In the end, I was able to salvage my MacBook and give it a massive cleaning from the inside out. Everything is still working great and it’s not sticky nor does it smell like alcohol.

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