I spilt wine in my keyboard, its all still working, except right shift isn't behaving nice in firefox, still works as expected in all other applications. In firefox, when I push the right shift, it goes back a page, like I pressed the backspace key. It even happens when I am typing in a textbox, its just weird.

Anyone ever hear of anything like this? I don't know if it was the firefox update that happened tonight and I managed to not push the key, or its related to the wine. I am finishing what I am doing, then going to pull it apart and clean it.

This isnt the 1st time things have gone in the keyboard, but usually its breakfast cereal milk or beer. This is what I get for using a wine glass not just any old glass.

It's fucked. You'll have to buy a new one.

If you dismantle and clean it, at best you'll regain most of the keyboards functionality.

I reserve that judgement till I have pulled it apart and cleaned it, but thanks for the vote of confidence.

I've gone through 3 keyboards.

On each one I did a quick dismantle, thorough clean and dry hoping if I did it faster or more thorough it might work out differently. You're chances of regaining functionality are slimmer with a more sticky liquid.

Sorry, man.

edit: then again, I've never spilled wine. It might clean out!

I've probably had at least a bottle's worth of wine go through my keyboard over the past two years, and it still works fine.

Likewise, as well as beer and other liquid crap I've spilled into mine. It's all the crud in my keyboard that makes keys get stuck and seem to fail, but ruin it... I doubt it, unless you hit the brain with the liquid. A good thorough dismantle and cleaning should help.

The keyboard is back together and is all working, I pulled it apart and wiped it, and its all good. Which is a good thing, as I am too cheap to go spend another $60 on another keyboard. This one has been with me for years and I am kind of attached to it. That and I don't like the new style logitech media keyboards.

Time for this to go off topic, does anyone have a piece of their computer that they has been with them for so long, they would cry if it died? My keyboard isn't so bad that way, its my OEM microsoft mouse that I have had for 11 years, I love it, and I would cry if it died.

Just don't let the liquid get into the circuit while its plugged in, and it should be perfectly fine after the innards and key caps are cleaned.

I've ruined a perfectly good keyboard by tilting it the wrong way before. oops. My "gamer" keyboard I won at Fragapalooza a couple years ago is excellent for spills, the inside of the actual keyboard is sealed, all the liquid can get into is the keys and the tray that holds the key sets. Its really quite nice. Totally worth what I paid (not sure its worth the $120+ retail price though)

Give it a few days and your buttons should work, it's probably still drunk and needs some time to relax and sober up.

My computer was originally assembled in 2002.

The only parts of it which are still original are the case, monitor, CD-RW drive, mouse, keyboard, floppy drive, 2.1 speakers and sound card. EVERYTHING else has changed at least once, motherboard included.

The parts of my computer I like the most are the keyboard (even though it's cheap), my five-button mouse, and my monitor, which may be a power-hungry flat CRT but has the lowest dot pitch I've ever seen and can hit 120 Hz at lower resolutions.

It's from 2002 but you still run Windows 98 on it?

Back then, as far as I'm aware, there was no such thing as DOSBox and 75% of my games were DOS based, so Windows 2000 was out of the question as not everything DOS based would work with it. We got the computer in early 2002... or it could've been late 2001 come to think of it, so XP wasn't exactly out yet either, and do you honestly expect anyone sane to install Windows ME on their own personal system?

Was it an apple keyboard with gold and small diamonds on it?

My "no name" keyboard cost about 7 USD, I've spilled beer, coke and water on it. I even banged it with my fist several times. Guess what... It still works.
Probably the best keyboard I've ever had

Not sure when my current computer was built, but the case, power supply, video card (and the heat sink on the current card), sound card (on-board don't work fully I found out recently, never used it for the life of the system and only found out when I went to take out the old one because of stupid drivers not working correctly), CD-ROM, hard drive (I think) have been replaced on this system. Doubled the RAM at some point. Right now, I'm saving up for a new system, as I'm sure the CPU will die at some point... No telling how much heat damage it got during it's life.

Well you said 2002. XP came out in late 2001.

You could always upgrade now too. XP is leaps and bounds better than 9x.

*shrugs* In any case, XP would've given me the same DOS problems at the time so if it was out I probably dismissed getting it for the same reason I didn't get 2K.

Nah. I'm going to be getting a whole new system soon and I intend to have Vista loaded onto it.

Understatement of the decade...

Vista! Awesome! Glad to see someone who's not afraid of it from all the FUD.

Anyhow, I spilled pepsi in my keyboard two nights ago and I think its about dead. I spilled water in it before and it corroded the traces on the switch layers. I took the whole thing completely apart, redrew them on with a circuit-writer pen, but it was too time consuming. I'm not about to rip it apart and repair it again.

Anyhow, I'm looking for a good board now. The DiNovo was recommended to me, but damn thats pretty expensive.

I like Vista. It has a few small issues, but it's the first Windows OS I can have running for weeks non-stop without any performance hits. I've also been able to go for nearly two years without having to do a reinstall. With XP I had to do that every six months or so.

A few years ago I spilled some of a chocolate milkshake in this keyboard. I quickly yanked the plug and cleaned it out thoroughly, and it seems to have not suffered any problems, except the left alt key being a bit finicky at times.

Please be more specific!

I never ran into fatal problems with XP, though the Windows way of doing things has plenty of legacy problems.

http://mostly-linux.blogspot.com/2006/06/10-things-new-linux-user-needs-to.html

OTOH, I can only find point'n'drool interfaces to file permissions in Vista, (and it bombs out and dies half finished, much like a file copying error in explorer) but to be fair I never tried it in any previous version of Windows.

I'm on Alltel wireless internet now, and I haven't yet figured out how to get the Windows/Mac only drivers working in Linux.

The OS got bogged down. It would start taking too long to boot up, and just performing everyday tasks would be slower.

Yes, I could have avoided this by not installing and uninstalling programs often, but I like to try new applications regularly. The OS should be robust enough to allow for this. XP isn't.

I've seen that stupid article before. And I believe I refuted every point on it already. I won't bother to point out how dumb most of it is because you seem mostly to be an anti-Windows zealot trapped without Linux, hiding behind an innocent Pepsi avatar.

My main killer of electronics is static. I've killed 3 mice and a keyboard with it, so I've gotten into the habit of gounding myself on the case before touching anything. I can get a big shock if I even get up and sit down in my chair .

I haven't spilled much, but what I have hasn't ever hurt anything.

Pay up, or suffer the wrath of copyright bs

[EDIT]
This is a major dis against Linux.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/1815226
I'm betting it'll be fixed within a week.

How long would it take MS to fix an equivalent wrongness?

I still have an old keyboard from an Olivetti M240 that I like to use... I've taken it apart and cleaned the keys and changed the LED indicators to different colors every so often... It's so easy to work with as the keys fit my hands perfectly... The only problem is its kinda heavy and big.

Cleaning water and wine and soda etc. out of electronics sucks... If you do it right though you can make it good as new. As long as it isn't something high-power like a TV then you should be alright just turning it off and cleaning and drying it out.

once i was rolling a joint and spilt a good chunk of the stuff into my keyboard

I role my own cigarettes, and quite a bit of tobacco was hiding under the keys, but a damp cloth fixed that.

I'm not sure how major it is (it seems to be just another way to hide a rootkit, given root access, and there are plenty of those), and I'm also not sure how fast it'll be fixed (since it seems to be mostly a problem with root having too much access, which is an oxymoron).

For that you have the cryptically named icacls.exe. Unless you just want to set the read-only, hidden, archive or system flags, in which case you can use good old attrib.

Complete non-issue on any platform. If you have root access, you've already won.

Last year I spilled a fresh, hot cup of tea with 2 sugars and milk over my work laptop. After 3 days of if not working, cutting out after powering up etc, and me crying and ripping my hair out (what? An Egg with hair?) it sprang back to life.

The only thing wrong with it now is that the right cursor key doesn't work. And it amazes me how much I miss that right cursor key.

The other issue with that is with virtualization. I'm not too familiar with how KVM/Xen/others work, but it seems that a VM running under those would be able to be exploited and screw up the host VM.

That's the problem I had with all the other keyboards I spilled on. After cleaning they worked fine, except for 3 or so keys.

It made me realize that I use every key on the keyboard.

When 95 came out, people went ape-s___ over its issues, such as the lack of direct video memory access. The same thing happened with ME (though, with ME it was actually justified), with XP, and now with Vista as well. Everyone focuses so hard on what sucks about a Windows OS that they fail to recognize everything that's done right.

Besides, everyone I personally know who complained about Vista before experiencing it actually started to like it BETTER than XP once they finally did start to use it.

I also already had the opportunity to test all the games I've made in Vista and they all work. PixelShips Retro has a tiny issue running full-screen, but the fix should be easy enough once I have regular access to a Vista system to test the changes necessary. Even an OpenGL sub-system I'm working on runs perfectly fine. I also intend to update my Visual Studio package as well once I get a Vista system, since I'm still using 6.

Vista is beautiful, and has a lot of features that are a major step up from XP. Unfortunately, some programs that are vital to me don't run on it, so I'll keep XP for a while.

You could have both running on the same PC with Virtual PC which MS now gives out for free.

I'm still using XP. Though if I have the money, I might go with Windows 7 when we get it. I understand that they'll be focusing on backward compatibility even prior to Vista.

You know, that's one thing about Microsoft I've never understood. We have programs like DOSBox, which run most DOS applications made in the 486 era or earlier better than Windows 95 or 98 ever did, so why does Microsoft struggle to make backwards compatibility work as well as can be done?

Granted, they came up with a good solution for DirectX once they passed v7: Just leave all the original code there and use the version the application was written for. I dunno if DX10 still works that way, but DX9 has all the code from DX7 and DX8 present and can thus run any application with the DX version it was designed under, with anything prior to 7 being run on the code for 7.

If the next iteration of Windows can demonstrate a vast backwards compatibility improvement then they're going to end up pleasing a surprisingly large number of people.

What are you suggesting? That they embed emulators for backwards compatibility? I personally don't want nor need that extra bloat, especially when there are solutions available that work well already.

I can't find the article, but it mentioned something about XP programs not working in Vista, and, a major component of Windows 7 will be to make those programs compatible again. Apart from that I can make no claims as to how far back the backward compatibility will go.

I personally have only tried one program that doesn't work right under Vista (that ran right under XP). XP Embedded studio, and from what I remember, it wasn't a Vista issue, it was some 32 vs 64 bit issue.