I had an open 2 litre bottle of water (stupidly) standing next to my my virtually brand new (3 months old) Dell Laptop on the desk a couple of days ago.
In a moment of distraction I inadvertently knocked over the bottle and water streamed out all over the keyboard while the laptop was running. Panic stations !!!

I dried the worst with a towel and immediately switched off the power and disconnected the battery. What was even more worrying was  the fact that when I tilted it on it's side water was running out of the ventilation ducts...
I dried it out as best I could for more than an hour using a fan heater at a low setting for over an hour.
Replaced the battery... And it started to boot! For about 15 seconds, after which the power cut out immediately again.
Put it through some more drying treatment... This time a disk checking error came up and it wanted to scan the drive, but it cut out again after about 10 seconds. Stuffed for sure I thought...

I then left it overnight turned on it's side, with the lid opened a bit to see if by morning maybe something would happen.
The next morning, with great trepidation I replaced the battery and voila!!!
After scanning the hard disk for consistency and errors it booted up perfectly and has been running 100% trouble free since! Phew !!!

I think part of the saving grace was that it was water and not some other liquid like Coke or Coffee etc. In any event I count myself very lucky indeed. Note to self : NEVER keep large containers of liquid anywhere near my laptop ever again.

PS - I know that Jacques mentioned that the IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpads have spill proof keyboards.
Why don't all manufacturers implement that, because spilling stuff on the keyboard such an easy thing to do by mistake.

I'm just very glad the story had a happy ending.

Part II

Damn I did it again! But only worse this time...

I had a glass filled with a fairly sticky soft drink standing in between my Laptop and an external hard drive on my desk. After finishing up with what I was busy with, I wanted to move the laptop to a different location. I totally forgot that the external HDD was still connected to the laptop. The USB cable snagged on the glass and spilled the soft drink all over the keyboard.

I immediately followed the same procedure as the previous time and immediately switched the laptop off, unplugged the power and battery and dried off excess liquid by turning it over etc with a towel, before starting the drying process. Because it was a sticky liquid that was involved I was very concerned. The last time it happened, after some drying, it at least started to power up before cutting out again. This time it was dead as a doornail. Thinking about what Jason said re. using water to wash circuit boards, I thought to myself... Would it do harm to pour a bit of water over the keyboard in an effort to dilute and loosen the sticky stuff? So I took a chance (I did not want to disassemble the laptop to get to the circuitry and keyboard because it's still under warranty) and poured a bit of water over the keyboard on purpose (while powered off) and then repeated the entire drying process.

Many hours later I tried it again and it powered up. After checking the HDD for consistency the Windows boot screen appeared. Except it wouldn't accept my password. Googling around on my phone I found that Soda spills etc. can often nuke a laptop keyboard. I had an external USB wireless keyboard and used that which was working fine so at least I could utilize the machine. But I shuddered at what the cost would be to replace the laptop keyboard. I tested the laptop keyboard from time to time on notepad and it was definitely a case of 'sticky keys'. Some very weird combinations were being displayed/happening when I pressed certain keys.

However, after using it with the USB keyboard for about 6 hours, I tested the laptop keyboard again and it was working fine!
Lucky escape no.2.

Since Dell in their wisdom have decided not to implement a spill proof keyboard, I'm now going to specify the machine on my insurance (which I should have done in the first place.)

Accidents happen quickly and spilling liquid on a laptop keyboard seems to happen a lot gathering from the articles I've read on the subject.