Half a glass of Coke Zero, in fact. We drained and dried it, and this morning half the keyboard doesn’t work. Are we totally borked or is this something a decent computer place can fix?
C9ke zero isn’t as sticky as regular Coke. If it is booting up I’d say take it and see what they can do; good chance they can just clean properly and get it working.
Sure, blame the cat.
Replacing the keyboard on a laptop isn’t necessarily a huge deal. This sort of thing happens enough that it is a common repair.
You could try removing the keyboard from the laptop, rinsing if off with water, then drying it again. You’d have to remove the keyboard to replace it anyway, and it’s already borked, so the only cost here is time to see if it works before ordering a replacement or taking it in. Instructions for taking laptops apart are usually on YouTube.
In my personal experience, even water ruins laptop keyboards. You can probably replace it though - I’ve done it before. It might be worth having a look on eBay for spare keyboards. In the meantime you can plug in a USB keyboard and use that.
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[li]PC gaming hardware | PC Gamer
I would also suggest not letting the cat have any more Coke.
Pepsi, instead.
I have dropped gear in water and had it work continuously until it finished drying out, and I have splashed a little coffee on items (one of my beloved thumb trackballs, in fact) that immediately died dead. It’s the luck of the draw. Being a 99.99% water solution helps, though. The problem is either that the water caused a damaging short and the problem is thus irreparable, or that it dissolved some existing goo (skin flakes, bit of cookie, drop of sugar from regular Coke) and caused a temporary short in a delicate place.
If you can find an electronics supply store and get a can of Blue Shower, you might succeed in cleaning out the keyboard and internals with it. It’s a spray cleaner that dissolves almost every organic substance and is inert to electronics.
Other than that, get the cat off coke.
Isopropyl alcohol.
…can damage a lot of plastics used in electronic gear.
Interesting. What does it do to the plastics? I’ve never noticed rubbing alcohol have much of an effect on it (and it seems to work fine on a circuit board [although that’s not plastic, is it?]–Apple wanted to charge me $1200 for a new logic board when some liquid got spilled on it. I went home and got to work with it with a Q-Tip and rubbing alcohol. Worked a charm, even three years later. 
)
I’d mostly be worried about the exotic plastics used in resilient trim and the LCD sandwich. A lot of base electronics - boards, components and connectors - are alky resistant to the point where iso is used to clean them in production. Not so much the user-side plastics on the keycaps, LCD face and bumpers, trim, etc.
The problem is that you need to get 100% alcohol for this to work properly. Many OTC Isopropyl alcohol solutions are 20-30% water.
Replacement PC notebook keyboards are typically $20 - $50 on ebay. Replacement requires some mechanical facility and small screwdrivers, but it’s not all that hard. But you have to be careful as delicate cable and wire connections are involved.
I’d double check your laptop’s warranty before you go doing any work on it yourself. While this damage is probably not covered by the warranty doing the repairs yourself could invalidate your warranty (or service contract), and they usually have little telltales that show if the case was opened by anybody other than an authorized service center.
Also, laptop components are small, delicate, and not always easy to remove, so I’d let a professional handle it (and assume responsibility if something goes wrong during the repair process).
The stuff I got that fixed the corrosion on my logic board (or whatever the hell it is that fixed it–it cleaned up the problem) was Target’s up & up brand 91% isopropyl alcohol. I very well may have gotten lucky, but I had nothing to lose–Apple wanted to replace the board so I could damage it all I wanted to and it was still going to cost me $1200. Luckily, I fixed the problem for $3.
A friend of mine got syrup on his laptop and the keys were all stuck. He had to leave or something immediately after, so he didn’t get a chance to clean up anything.
When he got home, there was a trail of ants from the patio door, across his living room, and into the laptop. He just let them go and went to sleep.
The next morning, all the ants were gone, and the keyboard worked normally.
So, try ants.
Do you mix that with the Coke?
The expensive part is hiring the anteaters to finish up. They don’t tell you that until you’ve already signed up.