What to Do When Tech Gets Wet

Whether you get caught in the rain or spill a glass of water, it’s good to review what to do if your phone or laptop gets wet.

The first thing to do, as soon as possible, is power off your device. Hold the power button down on a laptop for 10 seconds or hold it in on a smartphone until you get the prompt to turn off your device. If you are comfortable with popping out the SIM card and micro SD card on your phone (if you have one), do so. Dry and shake out all the water you can, then point a hairdryer on a low-temperature setting at your device. (See article linked to here about using isopropyl alcohol—and not rice—to displace water.) Now comes the hard part: Wait for at least 24 hours. Fight that urge to check every few hours.

Other things that gunk up smartphones include the charging port gathering lint (use tweezers or a plastic toothpick to get it out), dirt in the speakers or microphone holes (blast it with compressed air), and dirt and food on the screen (use eyeglass cleaning cloth and spray). Unidentified sticky stuff might come off with rubbing alcohol and finger action.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) don’t give you that same audible steady clicking of impending failure that traditional spinning hard drives do. But there are good free apps to check the health of an SSD. You can run either CrystalDiskMark for Windows or Smart Reporter Lite for macOS (see links at fairviewtowncrier.com/links). Both will run in the background and let you know of flaws before they totally eat your hard drive.

Don’t get stuck just on YouTube or Vimeo. There are many videos on Metacafe, Dailymotion, Veoh, The Open Video Project, 9GAG, TED Talks, or even The Internet Archive.

Digital photos can rot, meaning that those old external drives containing family photos do need to be recopied to newer drives every three to six years. The really important or valued photos should be stored in multiple places, maybe including online.   

Whether you get caught in the rain or spill a glass of water, it’s good to review what to do if your phone or laptop gets wet.

The first thing to do, as soon as possible, is power off your device. Hold the power button down on a laptop for 10 seconds or hold it in on a smartphone until you get the prompt to turn off your device. If you are comfortable with popping out the SIM card and micro SD card on your phone (if you have one), do so. Dry and shake out all the water you can, then point a hairdryer on a low-temperature setting at your device. (See article linked to here about using isopropyl alcohol—and not rice—to displace water.) Now comes the hard part: Wait for at least 24 hours. Fight that urge to check every few hours.

Other things that gunk up smartphones include the charging port gathering lint (use tweezers or a plastic toothpick to get it out), dirt in the speakers or microphone holes (blast it with compressed air), and dirt and food on the screen (use eyeglass cleaning cloth and spray). Unidentified sticky stuff might come off with rubbing alcohol and finger action.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) don’t give you that same audible steady clicking of impending failure that traditional spinning hard drives do. But there are good free apps to check the health of an SSD. You can run either CrystalDiskMark for Windows or Smart Reporter Lite for macOS (see links at fairviewtowncrier.com/links). Both will run in the background and let you know of flaws before they totally eat your hard drive.

Don’t get stuck just on YouTube or Vimeo. There are many videos on Metacafe, Dailymotion, Veoh, The Open Video Project, 9GAG, TED Talks, or even The Internet Archive.

Digital photos can rot, meaning that those old external drives containing family photos do need to be recopied to newer drives every three to six years. The really important or valued photos should be stored in multiple places, maybe including online.   

With all the hoopla over top commonly used search engines marketing what you look for, you should know that there are search sites out there that don’t. Wolfram Alpha (wolframalpha.com) is an example of a browser that doesn’t show ads and provides a different level of information than you might be used to.