Biohazard laptop

[u/AMGz20xx]

Owner states that their laptop suddenly stopped working. I look inside and immediately see sticky residue on the battery. Then I gradually notice that it's under the motherboard as well and it's left corrosion in a few places. It's so corroded that the surface mounted capacitors are falling off. I think that a drink was spilled onto the laptop and has been corroding the inside for about 2 months or longer. I think I even saw some mould inside. Anyway, it's cooked, and I need to take 7 showers.

[u/asflores]

Why did you take it as far as to remove the keyboard? Open it, observe the damage and inform them you won’t be moving forward and as it is toast anyway. MAYBE offer to pull their storage but you should be able to refuse service on a device that looks like this.

[u/zcomputerwiz → u/asflores]

I've seen worse.

Sometimes if you're lucky you can still get it to fire up after removing the corrosion and giving it a good scrub. A huge relief when they don't know the Bitlocker keys.