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.

Solution

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!).

Comments

[Ramhound]

If the keys are not working then you should consider the keyboard dead.

[Tamara Wijsman]

That edit sounds bad. Might be unrelated if just that. Does the rest work? You might want to create a new user account and log into that to cancel out this typical Windows 10 bug. (Yes, saw multiple occasions)

[Tamara Wijsman]

+1 The downvote isn't mine, but it all depends on what the water is made of. Different types of water have different properties. Some water dries out properly and it will work again, other might change the circuitry permanently and will require you to excessively wipe off the moisture.

[Jack Pollock]

@TomWijsman Surely it is also possible that if a water source directs an electrical signal to a very wrong place there is a possibility it could fry/break the keyboard..?

[Tamara Wijsman]

Yes, but there are enough factors involved (electrical currents, amount of time, amount of water, amount of contact, ...) for that to be "just a chance" rather than "it definitely fried".

[Jack Pollock]

@TomWijsman Yeah I didn't mean for it to come across like that... I should've definitely reworded it...