I'm sure you have all heard of the dreaded Windows errors that end up at a "blue screen of death". Well, one of our customers last week was experiencing exactly that with their Dell laptop.
Each time Windows would attempt to initialize the video drivers, it would result in a blue screen error stating that the nVidia drivers had crashed. This isn't uncommon, and can usually be fixed simply by starting Windows in VGA mode and reloading the nVidia drivers, but in this case that didn't work.
To investigate further, I lifted the keyboard and found a "liquid" spill that had gone through the keyboard and soaked the video card (which is a removable unit in this particular laptop). The fluid looks like it seeped under the video cards heat spreader and shorted out some of the memory modules. After talking to the customer, we found out that she had suspected her cat, attracted by the warmpth, might have relieved itself on the laptop while it was open and running. This is the first blue screen of death we've seen that was caused by a yellow stream of death.
In the end, we couldn't source a replacement part for the machine, so we returned it to the customer without charge and recommended that they call Dell to see how much their cat just cost them. In the mean time, the machine continued to work as long as Windows was started in VGA (640x480) mode rather than any of the higher resolution modes that the video card could support.
