The silica dessicant packs will suck a lot more moisture out than the rice if you can lay your hands on some fresh ones. The rice is a crap shoot depending on how well it's been dried out and the humidity under which it was packaged I expect. Avoid the temptation of turning the unit on for at least a week or so, and don't be surprised if it does work, but then gets wonky months down the road.
There are a lot of trace elements, metals, salts, etc present in most water. Take away the moisture and you're still left with possible shorts across traces on very tiny centers, or shorts or resistances that manifest based on humidity. Long story short, unless you're very lucky the upswing is that you will very likely be upgrading the device sooner rather than later.
Let us know how you eventually make out.
There is one other thing you might try to improve your chances of success. Back when I was designing, selling, maintaining electronic control systems we designed and built our own boards, back in the through hole days. After populating the boards and soldering we used Fantastick cleaner to scrub them with a toothbrush to deflux them, rinsed them, and then did a final scrubbing with lacquer thinner(acetone) on a toothbrush to remove and dissolve anything left behind. I'm not sure how well that might work for you, but it tended to remove any contaminants on the finished boards and we never had problems with any residues left on the boards. You might try it as a last resort. Bear in mind, the damage may already have been done when the device got hot.
If you do try the lacquer thinner be very careful not to get it on any plastics as it may dissolve them, especially the flexible printed kapton film ribbon cables used these days. This is risky stuff, you've been warned.
Last edited by TechniSol; 03-30-2014 at 11:07 PM.
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