I killed a Thinkpad by dripping some water on it, just a couple drops of condensation from the outside of a glass of water. F1 key stopped working, the trackpoint mouse buttons started clicking constantly so I had to rip them off. The A key needs to be hit hard to work. The wifi constantly drops now. The only thing that happened was dripping some water on it.
Granted, it still works, just not well. However I have a pre-iPad Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t that has seen pretty constant use as my daily driver Xubuntu laptop for almost five years now. I've probably put thousands of running hours on it and it still works like a (slow and ancient netbook) dream.
They're tough, but certainly not completely indestructible. I thought they were until the water incident.
You may have gotten water into the circuitry of the keyboard, but that's its own replacable unit and has a tray (with the elsewhere-mentioned water holes) to protect the interior of the laptop. Particularly for intermediate models it may be worth picking up a replacement keyboard and dropping it in - not so sure if it's an old T60 or the like.
Yeah I'm comparing the cost of replacing the keyboard and the wifi card versus just donating it and getting a new laptop that doesn't have the Nvidia Optimus and some other features I'm not fond of (and a less power-intensive processor).
The keyboard and the wifi card together would only be like $60 though, which is really nice.
Which era of Thinkpad? Someone spilled a full glass of red wine all over my X31 while it was turned on and it was fine the next day (same machine survived much other abuse, including being thrown down a flight of stairs). That machine is still running and the keyboard is still better than even most of the newer Thinkpads.
Granted, it still works, just not well. However I have a pre-iPad Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t that has seen pretty constant use as my daily driver Xubuntu laptop for almost five years now. I've probably put thousands of running hours on it and it still works like a (slow and ancient netbook) dream.
They're tough, but certainly not completely indestructible. I thought they were until the water incident.