Hello there just 1 month after my TV burned out and became unable to watch, I was without TV so I began using my laptop to watch TV on on with a tuner. Well, one night my son dropped a half glass full of water directly onto the laptop the keyboard area from left to right, I jumped up and immediately flipped the laptop upside down and began patting it down with paper towels as much as possible. I got 90% of it but the rest must have sank into the laptop itself...its a HP DV8000 $1400 laptop.

Now everything works perfectly...sound, power, hard drive, dvd drive, Im typing with a USB desktop keyboard so that works ok, however, NONE of the buttons of the keyboard itself on the laptop work at all. Not even the num pad that didnt get wet at all. The mouse pad and power/volume buttons above the keyboard work fine as well.

Also noted, on the LCD display there is a BRIGHT splotch about 1 inch wide and 3 inches high and also its all along the bottom of the display like waves about an inch high only at the bottom though.
The spots are getting smaller and less bright as time goes by.


Can someone please help me out and tell me what I could do to fix it or is it possible to buy just a new keyboard for the laptop and have someone install it? I saw replacements but I dont know how to install it.


Also I tried to take all the screws out the laptop and open it up but even with all the screws out it wouldnt open up, I couldnt figure out how to open it up to dry it out.

Please help this is a family laptop with critical data on it and we dont have $1000 for a new one.

Model: HP DV8000 black laptop
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor
ATI Radeon 200M Xpress Graphics Card
2GB RAM

Stop using it.

The more you have it on with water in there, the worse off it is going to be. Open the laptop screen all the way and sit it upside down, you'll have to let it dry out. A fan may help speed the drying, but don't sit it in the sun. It will be a couple of days to dry it out. You're lucky it was water; sugary drinks will leave sticky sugar remnants and make things worse, water will just evaporate and not leave any issues - usually. It depends on the damage already done.

I took your advice and its working...OK excellent news, update the keyboard suddenly just started working again I guess after drying out for 3 days. The spot on the display went down about 1 inch per day and its day 5 and its only about the size of a business card. However,

The problem now is 8 keys, space bar, caps lock, tab, R T Y V were removed and the little plastic that keeps them in place was broken on a few of them. I couldnt get them back on some of them broke in the process. Any suggestions on just getting THOSE keys replaced and not the entire keyboard? Im using a USB keyboard now to type and it sucks.

I wonder if a laptop repair shop would even fix those keys for me and how much would they charge probably a fortune.

I still have the keys themselves are OK just need to have them installed onto the laptop. Some of the plastic little tiny holders are broken though.

How were they removed? Why were they removed?
Dell does not offer individual keys - it would be a stocking nightmare, and what's the point of replacing a single key if it is going to break when you put it on? I'm sure HP uses the same policy.
You may be able to find a repair shop where they might be able to fix it... I'm not sure how though. I know I couldn't do it on Dells.

no the keys are broke off, i have the actual keys but the plastic that holds them in is broke, i just need to find someone who will install them back on, i cant figure out how to do it by myself. they wont break once they're back on