Coffee, especially coffee or other drinks with sugar get ugly in a
hurry... the last one I worked on one, I finally extracted the fact from
the "spiller" that immediately after he knocked over the keyboard,
'there was a large spark under the "H" and "J" keys'
When I dug into that area, a daughter board at that location showed
considerable burn marks... I proceeded to pull his hard drive so we
could at least salvage his data ;-)
In this case, it looks like at least the key switches were contaminated
going back further into the electronic archives of my past;
a clear water dunking at least gives you some time and you _may_ get
lucky with other liquids if they didn't create an electric short.
The best approach is to remove any and all batteries and hard drives,
then flush with distilled water, shake and blow out as much water as
possible, then flush with pure denatured alcohol and do the same, then
dry the unit with a fan and perhaps a strong light.
Hard drives are sealed for dust, but not air and liquid, so, if the hard
drive was immersed or doused with a significant amount of liquid, it's
possible that liquid got inside with the heads and platters. get's dicy
here, but I rotate and position the drive in all possible orientations
to see if any liquid escapes... if so, will crack the case to get what I
can out, fan dry, close it and immediately see if I can recover data
using a usb box.
However, in general with electronics, what happens is that water has
already migrated into chip pads and legs so corrosion starts within the
chips themselves as well as elsewhere in the device.
I've managed to get a number of devices up and running following a
dunking using the above, but in every case erratic problems would pop up
weeks or months after the recovery, so, I now tell anyone I help with
this to expect the device to fail and use the recovery only as a stopgap
until they get a replacement.
Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]