How I Revived My Computer When it Wouldn't Turn On

How I Revived My Computer When it Wouldn’t Turn On

ByLiberty August 23, 2024

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Have you ever had a problem where your computer won’t turn on? And your heart sinks and you really wish you had saved and backed up all of your documents but now it’s too late? Today I’m writing to give you some hope! Today I’m going to tell you what happened to me when my computer would not power on.

My laptop computer wouldn’t turn on. I hadn’t dropped it. I had not mistreated it in any way. I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t even very old.

And then I realized something. I realized it was rather humid in my house because we didn’t have any air conditioning. In fact, my little humidity gauge was reading 85%. No, it hadn’t rained in my room. But it sure felt wet!!

So I had an idea. What if I put my whole laptop in a gigantic ziplock bag with rice in it? You know, you’ve heard of doing this if you accidentally get your phone wet. You can put your cell phone in a ziplock/ self-locking bag with rice for awhile.

The rice absorbs the moisture and your phone works again. Just like when you put rice in your salt shaker to keep the salt from clumping up. You do put rice in your salt shaker, don’t you?

Well, it so happened that I had a huge, 2 gallon ziplock bag. I had ordered a pack of 100 of them on Amazon a long time ago when I used them to organize my small kids’ clothes for a trip. So I put around a cup or so of rice in the bag.

Then I carefully set my laptop on top of the rice, so that the rice wouldn’t get in any of the ports and holes in the computer. Then I zipped the bag closed. After 12 hours, my laptop did not turn on. After 24 hours it still didn’t work.

closed laptop in ziplock bag to keep out humidity

But after 36 hours??? After 36 hours of being in the giant ziplock bag with rice, my laptop came back on!!! It was fine! Nothing else was wrong! I was so excited! So from then on, I store it in the bag of rice when I’m not using it. I also decided to store my important 100 GB external hard drive in there, too.

Later, I decided to just use a second bag with rice for more USB storage drives. You can see it peeking out in the orange bin above.

And I haven’t had any computer problems since then. It made me wonder about the last laptop that stopped working on me— I wonder if it just needed to sit in a bag of rice for awhile?!

I know this was not my usual post about a project. But it will help you save money if you don’t have to buy a new computer. And you know how much I like to save money!! A penny saved is a penny earned. And a computer saved is a computer earned!