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Spilled a tiny bit of liquid -- diet coke, actually -- on the old macbook, and while the internals are OK, it got behind the monitor, which now has a bright blotch where the light is being affected.

I'm hoping it will dry a bit and become less noticeable... but I already took off the bezel, and poked around.

It looks to me like taking the LCD panel itself apart and trying to clean is probably a hornet's nest of tiny screws and wires. Very probably inadvisable for other reasons. Any thoughts? I'm not talking about just removing the panel from the top case, but actually separating the layers oh so carefully.

[shifuimam]

There's no way you can remove the actual transistor layer from the glass without destroying the display. Anyhow, it's unlikely the liquid got between those two layers.

What you CAN do, however, is remove the LCD from the backlight assembly. It's not too difficult, unless the MacBook LCD uses some new hardware setup compared to other LCDs I've taken apart in the past. There should only be a few screws that secure the display to the backlight assembly. Just be careful, take your time, and be patient - the last thing you want is to crack the LCD, because then you're totally screwed.

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Thanks, man

Today the damp spot is considerable smaller. I'm thinking that the water will dry out entirely -- whether the coke leaves brownish residue remains to be seen.

I looked at the panel, and it does appear to me that the backlight is secured to the rest by quite a few tiny screws in inconvenient spaces. The screws are smaller that the others I removed, and then wires cover them. I don't think I'll chance it, since I'm not all that adept at reassembling less than simple assemblies.

Thanks, though. I might still give it a shot if the unit doesn't recover entirely on its own.

cb