Gadgetory

with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts so I've gotten some complaints that we don't do enough crazy projects anymore now the fact of the matter is that a lot of the time we don't plan to do crazy things that you know our things are broken and stuff it just kind of happens so it kind of happened this time this is my Dell XPS 12 that I've been using for the last quite a while we were in the middle of shooting something yesterday and I kind of ran off this morning I was running around looking for it going where the heck is it because it wasn't at home and I found it on the porch and unfortunately it rained last night so this is the state of it this water is actually dripping out from inside the notebook now there is an extremely good chance that this notebook is completely dead with non battery-powered devices it's often you could basically submerge it and then if you could open it up and completely dry and make sure there's no residue or nothing to short it out there's a very good chance that would live but something with a battery in it it's constantly getting power provided to it so the chances of shorting something out and destroying it are very good so it was actually left open like this so the water it was able to force its way in through the keyboard so this is I mean this is a very very rough shape but you know thousand-dollar notebook you're still gonna you're still going to take a shot at fixing it right so I'm pulling out my eye fix-it kit with my Torx heads here actually these are a handy new thing we've got now these nice little magnetic trays and we're going to do a sub $100 maybe we might have actually done it by the time this video is done but sub $100 handy things and we're going to highlight those because I think they're great so I'm going to pull off the bottom here we'll be back in a moment all right so this is kind of the moment of truth we're going to open up the shell fortunately I don't have an Apple computer so comes apart even though it's an ultrabook type form factor so you can see the entire inside is absolutely soaked with water being able to run out a little bit more freely now but I have it opened up now one thing that I'm going to want to do pretty much immediately here is disconnect the battery connector I mean the like I said it's it's probably a done deal at this point but it still can't hurt to have the power disconnected unfortunately it looks like it looks like Dell glues that in why would they do that Dell what are you guys doing there is a chance that if I dry this out completely and replace the battery that I'll be able to get it back up and running again but I'm gonna have to figure out how to get this connector off first so panic moment there guys it turns out that water on a connector that's beaded up kind of looks like glue so no the battery is not glued in so what I'm going to do next is pull the battery out and actually I'm gonna I'm going to pull it apart as much as I can without going so far that I lose track of how it goes back together and then basically I'm going to put it somewhere to dry and then we're going to do the old rice bag technique this is just a handy sort of do yourself a favor trick is whenever you're taking something apart take lots of pictures because even if you forget one little detail it can be a major hassle later on and then one thing that I'm doing is well is because it's got several different kinds of screws I am making sure that that I take pictures of the heads as well as the threads next to the place where they come from this just makes your life a little bit easier when you're putting it back together you can see I've got the battery out now and then I've also got the I'm just I'm just loosening PCBs so that I can get a little bit of airflow going through them and then what I'll do is I'll just set up a fan to blow on it for now before I do the rice bag trick later on because you can't on the rice to do everything that's more of more of a finishing move so to speak so I'm pretty close to having it about as disassembled as I think I'm going to get it I was hoping that because of the way the screen works on this notebook with this metal border around the top of it that the screen itself wouldn't have really gotten any water in it because it was upright when we started raining but Luke pointed out to me well hold on a second surface tension it's going to come around here and then it's going to drip onto the screen from this gap in between where the the model I think they call it a ferris wheel style convertible screen so he was right water did get into the screen so we've got the carbon-fiber top off now it's really light carbon-fiber is kind of cool but the good news though is that because it comes apart quite easily much like the rest of this notebook I'm able to open it up and get at least I mean there's not much water in here so I'm really not that concerned about this part and it's mostly the bottom components here that I'm worried about so basically what I've done is I've removed the motherboard kind of as much as I can you can see it's quite loose it's only being held in over here and then I've prized it up a little bit so that it's going to can get a little bit more airflow I'm going to go position this in front of a fan and cross my fingers I've taken the SSD out and then in order to speed things up you can dry things out by soaking them in alcohol and then letting that evaporate away so this I need some data off of so I'm going to go ahead I'm going to do that with this but I'm going to give the note put probably a good solid week before I take another shot at it so here's my epic set up with got a three speed fan running here and then I've got all of my all my parts in my handy dandy little please focus really Wow going to be like that okay my parts tray then I've got the disassembled notebook taken apart and opened up as much as possible for optimal sort of airing out nests I suspect that I actually won't need the the rice bag I'm gonna leave this here for about a week and then we'll see how it goes I got things kind of lifted up there yeah so a funny story I started by putting the screws in around the outside of the monitor and I was like now need to put the heatsink on I need to put the battery back in let's find out if this bad boy fires up and then let's go ahead and invest in all the finishing touches there so I'm actually at the point now or the fan and heatsink are back on I put the SSD back in for a good measure and it's time to put the battery on actually I got to put this connector back on first okay so a moment of truth time I have latent got every one I did all the stuff I can do by myself so I'm going to plug the battery in not going to bother screwing it in just because who knows if this is all just a total waste of time I plugged this bad boy in here oh my god not Jesus Christ gah you actually did scare me there okay should it be making noise here we go Oh looks like an activity led up warning battery is critically low huh whoa here you can come have a look at the screen here oh so it powers on the keyboard LEDs are illuminated the activity LED on the SSD is going so that means it's not just completely dumb in there let's uh cool okay I'm going to turn it off for now and grab a power adapter and find out if she boots into an OS wow that's unbelievable i impressed something actually happened I was expecting nothing at all yeah I was expecting complete dead like damn that's actually pretty amazing hmm if this thing works you're never allowed to get another top you have to continue to upgrade this laptop forever oops another side oh yeah sure be gentle with it okay let's try firing her up again so I actually i-44 went is that the past tense of forgo I for went the the rice treatment because I was impatient so it sat here for about a week no I mean which evidently was enough the thing I don't know yet because the thing that's most like look at that what why I left it what oh my god there's my ax 1500 i unboxing review things unbelievable look at that it did not even miss a beat unbelievably unplugged Wow week and having been soaked that is that's unreal that is something else look at that so it remains to be seen how well the battery held up because that was the big thing that could have been damaged and could have lit on fire like it's a lithium based battery like it could have been a big problem but it turns out that it was well enough sealed and the screen was well enough sealed that we didn't get much water in there that the notebook actually works so there you go guys all is not necessarily lost no matter how hopeless it looks thank you for coming along for this voyage of discovery you're on - tech tips like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let us know I don't know so I'm sure you have 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