Water spilled on my laptop's keyboard

Question

Friday night, the night before a long day of travel, I spilled water on my laptop just before I was about to close it down and put it in my bags. I waited a few minutes before fetching paper towels to soak up whatever I could, but did not immediately unplug and disassemble and turn upside down. I'm running a Lenovo IdeaPad, which has a spill-resistant keyboard (I think, because the keys are all separated from one another in independent slots) so it didn't feel like the end of the world at the time to just dry it off, pack it up so that it faced downwards, and go on yesterday's drive with it in the back.

However, while the computer itself is not behaving strangely, several keys do not work or are associated with the wrong keystroke. The backspace key, for instance, types 48 instead, while the Enter key creates an endless stream of the number 4. Could this be a sign of deeper damage that I am not aware of? Should I just get a USB keyboard to fix the problem?

I have had similar trouble before but went through the proper procedure for fixing it and after a week or two the laptop was on its feet again and a USB keyboard held me over until then.

Edit: The laptop is running Windows 10. Right now when I log in, the backgrounds do not appear, several taskbar icons are missing, and the start menu does not come up when clicked. Other than this and the keyboard issue, it does not appear to be badly damaged.

Answer 1

If your keyboard does different things, it means that its electronic circuit is different. The printed circuit itself of course doesn't change (unless a short circuit occurred); so, this means that there is still water inside your keyboard that conducts electricity between the contacts of the circuit.

Unless you can the keyboard out and/or apart to remove the droplets of water and moisture, you will likely want to wait for it to dry. This can be speed up with heat (some extra degrees above a radiator), although excessive heat can shorten the lifetime of the components (do not cook!).

Answer 2

As @Ramhound said, it is most likely that your keyboard is now dead/damaged. Not definitely, but most likely as you didn't properly go through the procedure to try and prevent any damage straight away. I would recommend trying a USB keyboard to see if that works. If it does then it is most likely that your laptop keyboard is dead. If the USB keyboard behaves strangely or similarly to your laptop keyboard then that could be a sign of more serious damage to the laptop.

Scratch what I said. What @Tom Wijsman said is more likely.

I don't believe water damage would cause the firmware (Windows 10) to incorrectly display things but it is a possibility.

Try a USB keyboard and let us know what happens.

Answer 3

You might be lucky if you leave it to dry well, but I wouldn't count on it.
Given the problematic backspace and enter key (which share some wiring in most keyboards) I say this keyboard has a short-circuit and is permanently damaged.

But a repair is something you can easily do yourself or ask a handy friend/family member to do if you don't trust yourself to do it...
It is well in the realm of basic DIY skills.

Lenovo has instructions (even videos in some cases) how the do that on their web-site for just about every model they make.
The replacement spare-part is relatively cheap (about $80 for most models) and can be ordered from Lenovo directly or via various specialist web-shops that sell replacement parts. (The alternative stores are often cheaper... It pays to shop around.)