Laptop Keyboard problem

[#1]

My wife's laptop is fairly old, so it has a keypad with buttons (I don't know if new laptops have a touch surface rather than buttons). She has spilt some ginger beer on it, and the keyboard doesn't seem to work now, although I cannot detect a button that may have stuck. She has to log in with a password when she starts it up, but cannot, the keys don't show as a '*' when we type. However, the display suggests that something is being typed in when it isn't, because a stream of '*' appears where the password should be but at a slow, irregular rate. The backspace key will delete these '*' but one at a time, so at least that key seems to work properly.

With luck it will dry out, though ginger beer was probably one of the worst liquids to spill on it. I dont fancy buying a new laptop because neither of us have experience of post Windows 7 OSes, so we would have to learn Windows 11, we dont want to be stuck using the cloud (we want our data to be on our computers), and I guess the version of Office she has on her laptop will be lost to us.

Anyone ever had to clean this type of keyboard? Is it difficult/unreliable/expensive/etc?

My thanks for any help.

[#2]

@penneck My suggestion, bearing in mind the 'gunginess' of ginger beer, is to take the laptop to a reliable repair shop - if they can't clean it up, they may be able to source a replacement keyboard - which is probably the best option as you won't know where the stuff will have seeped, and from your description, it sounds as though this is fairly major damage.

[#3]

@penneck 

Are you aware that Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 7 in 2020, so you will not have received any security or other updates for about 3 years?

Are you using this laptop to connect to the internet?

[#4]

@jab1 , I had thought of that, but its finding a reliable repair shop. I'm still hoping, fool that I am, that it will fix itself, before I go down tthat path.

@Mr_Paul Yes I knew about Windows 7 Support stopping, but thanks for pointing it out. You never know, maybe I had missed that news

[#5]

@penneck 

If ginger beer is anything like Coke it is both sticky and electrically conductive. I suspect that the time and cost involved getting a third party to fix it would be significant. If it was mine I would, just for the hell of it but little hope of success, see if there’s any strip down instructions on t’internet, take it apart, wash the keyboard in warm water, air dry it and see if that fixed it.

[#6]

"If ginger beer is anything like Coke it is both sticky and electrically conductive."

Not to mention very acidic (Coke).

[#7]

post removed.. repeat of a previous one

Dan.

[#8]

Good news (if you are a tight-fisted, lazy old *** like me). The laptop is working again. The slow display of '*' has stopped. There were a few scares still - when typing in the login password, the upper case M wouldn't work, but I was using the lefthand Shift button for it. By sheer chance I thought, try it with the righthand Shift button instead, and the upper case M worked. I was now able to log in so I tried testing the full keyboard and found none of the front row of letters would go into upper case if I used the lefthand Shift button (they didn't work at all if I used the lefthand Shift button, so i didn't even get lower case letters). Ditto the Numbers row, which wouldn't give me the other symbols on those buttons. In both cases, none of the buttons, even the none letter or number buttons, worked in combination with the lefthand shift button. In another case of luck, I pressed the Numbers Lock button, and then found the top and bottom rows of buttons now worked properly with or without either Shift button. 

So, end result appears to be a fully operational laptop.

My thanks to all of you for your help.

[#9]

@penneck  It doesn't sound like the keyboard is working very well though, if you need to use it.🤔