Well, while I was writing my last post, my fiancee spilled a glass of water onto my Dell Inspiron 700m Laptop. Of course… by accident.

A substantial amount of water went into the keyboard while the system was on, and strangely there were no (visible) side effects. Being not retarded (most of the time), I immediately powered the system off and attempted to remove all of the water as soon as possible. I turned the system upside down and let water drain for about 5 minutes, then put the system in front of a fan for 15 minutes.

Afterwards, I turned the system on and…

and…

it booted just fine.

So thanks for the attempted watercooling of my 700m, Kessa. And FYI, I like water, but my computer… not so much.

Update!

I turned the system on the next morning and… and… things were not so good this time. The system turned on at first, but when going to login, the system froze. Upon turning it off and back on, the LED lit up signifying the system was on, but the display remained black. After shutting it off again and turning it on, the BIOS came up and it showed this error:

ERROR 0280: Previous boot incomplete – Default configuration used.

At this point, I was thoroughly screwed. I decided to do all of my homework, projects and notes on my laptop this semester, so the homework due today that I had spent 2 hours on, and the project due this weekend that I had spent ~35 hours on were both inaccessible. Since I have a “3 year economy warranty“, good until 05/27/2008, I decided to call support to see if something could be done or replaced.

I had to leave for class in about 20 minutes, but while I was on the phone with Dell Support I was able to boot into safe mode of Windows XP. By this time, I had to leave for class, so I figured that was good for now, I could at least get my data off and call back later. I shut off the system and went to class.

After class I attempted to boot the system, and was… unsuccessful. About 4 out of 5 times that I tried, the system would just display the blank screen and not proceed. The other 1 out of 5 times, it would get the above error, and then get to the blank screen when I pressed “<F1> to continue.” So I brought the system to work with me. I plugged the hard drive into a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M60 (which is quite a machine, btw), and it booted up just fine. I took this opportunity to backup all of the data I needed to (homework, notes, projects, oh my), then put the hard drive back into the 700m.

I called Dell support again. This time, after holding for about 20 minutes, the person with whom I spoke led me to removing the battery, CD-ROM and hard drive, both sticks of RAM, the keyboard, and reseating the display cable. After doing this, the same error occurred (obviously), so the support technician deduced that the problem was in the motherboard. She said that the motherboard replacement was covered by my Economy warranty, and that someone would call my house in 2 days to come and replace it THAT DAY. Wow, they weren’t kidding about a “Next Business Day Service Call.”

So… we’ll see if that fixes the problem. I have no doubt that it will at this point, but it could be multiple components that are now faulty.

Update 2!
The Dell technician came today. For the record, that’s 1 day (22 hours) after the call was logged. WOW. Speak of fast service. The whole replacement took about 45 minutes. I powered it on afterwards, and it works awesome. Thanks Dell!
I took a picture of the 700m dismembered.