Help, please.
 

I don't know, I guess this is the right place for it.

Okay, hypothetical time.

Assume you have a dumbfuck of a cousin. And assume they think that since they're at your house, your stuff is theirs, too. And further assume they don't know not to put open drinks next to hardware.

If they were to spill their root beer onto your laptop (Dell Inspiron 1300) and now, only 2 keys are sticky, the mouse works*, and everything seems to be running smoothly except! Except! The screen will not come on, what should be done? What is the problem, am I are you fucked?

*see below.

I have a cousin living at my house, and if she ever made our computer mess up, I'd make sure she paid every cent it takes to repair or replace.

Best bet is to take it in to get assessed. I highly doubt it's anything you can fix yourself; find out what the repair bill is, and see if it's worth paying (or having paid ;))

Also, a new symptom I just discovered before quickly turning off the machine due to the advice of a friend ("You don't want to bake the root beer crap onto the innards"), the mouse is unresponsive at times, I guess I'll just have to take it in.

Have you possibly considered murder? Or at the very least a sound beating? You could always try shoving what's left of your laptop into one of your cousin's bodily orifices. I kid! I kid! It'll never fit, and you might still be able to fix it.

Look, on a more serious note, I know shit-all about laptop computer innards and how they respond to soft drink baths, but dumbfuck cousins are something of a specialty of mine. You have my sympathy. And don't forget to make goddamn sure Cousin Dumbfuck pays for the repairs.

Ask him to pay for it, politely, there is no need to start a big family feud (As kickass as that would be).

Chances are he/she will pay for the damages as he/she caused them. If your cousin disagrees, make his life hell by broadcasting his/her idiocy to the world.

Yeah, if monitors short out due to liquids, just take it in. Most of the do-it-yourself stuff is like software problems, where something isn't working right but it has nothing to do with any actual physical manipulation.

Yeah, if you're an extreme DIY-er, laptops are a cast-iron bitch to recover from hardware problems. With a desktop, if you have a bad connection with the monitor, you can replace the cord, monitor, or GPU. In a laptop? Better get your soldering iron ready. And that's still no guarantee.

*points to the Internet* Uh...

it almost sounds like the system board is now fried thanks to the root beer, Dam soda