First post, by frozengrievr
While vacationing in Asia I picked up a second hand Sony VAIO PCG-R505MSP, which is a Pentium III 1.2GHz model with 256MHz RAM. It came with a docking station which has a DVD/CD-RW drive, floppy drive, as well as an array of old ports so I thought it would be an interesting pickup to tinker with.
The previous owner kept the laptop in long-term storage in a zipped laptop bag, and given the tropical weather, I was not surprised that the laptop exhibits the dreaded vinegar syndrome. The laptop also seemed to be leaking some sort of sandy white powder, which I initially assumed to be residue from the vinegar syndrome. To my surprise, the laptop turned on as seen in the attached photos.
I then tried opening the shell to remove the CMOS battery and the HDD. To my horror, it looks like the entire interior surface of the shell is undergoing some sort of corrosion with white powdery flakes forming everywhere. I'm going to put this down to the acidic gas released from the vinegar syndrome LCD interacting with the magnesium alloy shell within the zipped laptop bag. The HDD has since died after I opened the shell, possibly due to the powder getting into the mechanisms.
Just wondering if anyone has seen any corrosion like this before ? As the actual electronics seemed to work fine before the HDD died, I wonder if it's worth doing full disassembly to clean the corrosion off the interior shell.