Originally Posted by
Loren Pechtel
Grade A male bovine excrement.
There might be a tiny amount of lubrication on the bearings but not enough to leak out. There's more likely a bit in the cooling fans but again it's still a tiny quantity. In 20+ years of dealing with PCs I have yet to encounter a liquid inside that is not due to something being spilled on the machine.
Since you say it's a new laptop I would be more inclined to think along the lines of traces of chemicals used in production. There will be traces of flux on the board from when it was soldered, there's a wide range of chemicals that get used as thermal paste between hot components (especially the CPU) and their heat sinks and those most certainly remain in the machine. As it goes on as a paste there's a solvent of some sort that will slowly be driven off. While much of it leaves upon first use older material does still get harder with time which means it's still leaving.
Ditto.
The TSO was either a moron, or making stuff up to cover his ignorance of why OP's DD's laptop alarmed, or both.
Since ETD looks for certain precursor chemicals, it's most likely that the new laptop in question came into contact with one of those chemicals during the manufacture, shipping, or sales processes. It could be present in a lubricant used on the manufacturing or packaging machinery; it could have been transferred from an employee at the manufacturer, packager, shipper, or retail location; or it could have been transferred from the owner, one of her friends or relatives, or the checkpoint TSOs themselves (few TSOs seem to have a clue about cross-contamination).
But "oil from the hard drive"? Poppycock!