Customer brought in a laptop that smelled like a campfire

Last month a guy walks in with a Dell that reeked of smoke and had black soot caked around the vents. He said it stopped turning on after he left it on his porch overnight, and he didn't think the rain got in. I opened it up and the battery was swollen, pushing against the case, and the motherboard had corrosion spots in three places. I told him the repair would run about $180 for a new battery and board cleaning, and he just said, "Can't you just blow it out with air?" Has anyone else had people think a can of compressed air fixes water damage?

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joseph_green1312d ago

Three years in the shop and I’ve seen a guy try to dry out a waterlogged motherboard with a hair dryer on high heat, which just baked the corrosion in harder. But the real thing nobody talks about is the smell. That campfire scent doesn’t go away with a new battery and a cleaning. It’s soaked into the foam pads, the speaker grilles, and the fan blades. You can fix the board, but every time that laptop warms up, the whole room is gonna smell like a burnt marshmallow. The customer will be back in a month complaining about the odor, and then you’re stuck explaining that replacing half the plastic shell costs more than the laptop is worth. Honestly, at $180 he should just buy a refurb and skip the whole smoky mess.