This reminds me of a time I tried to install Ubuntu on an old thick Dell laptop many years ago.
Each time I would try the system would overheat and then crash. The existing (windows) system still appeared to work fine with light loads so I was pretty sure I just needed to get past the install and decided to try one more time.
It was winter at the time, I can't remember if it had snowed recently, but I think it was probably close to 40 degrees F outside. So I hooked up a wired keyboard and mouse, and then plopped the laptop outside on the deck and closed the door with only the keyboard and mouse inside. There was a window which I could see the screen through and start the install.
Sure enough with the natural winter cooling the install completed and I was able to use the laptop for a few more years.
Still, IMO a better solution is fixing the hardware. Many years ago, I had similar symptoms with an old thick HP laptop. I think I have paid something like $30 for the new fan assembly, it’s a large part which includes a fan, radiator and couple of heat pipes. The assembly connects to the motherboard with a small plug, no soldering was required. It only took half an hour (and a blob of thermal paste) to replace the part.
Opening it up and vacuum cleaning the fan from dust also can do wonders with old and "broken" laptops as a first step. Tiny bit of WD40 in the fan mechanic is the next, then thermal paste, then replacing parts.
(Advice, prevent the fan from spinning while doing vacuum)
Disconnect the fan cable from the socket so that the motor doesn't send pulses of energy back into your laptop. It probably won't harm it, but better safe than sorry.
So you "disprove" my statement with some rando on the Arduino message board that has less than 20 posts in their lifetime?
What makes you think they're an authority?
Brushless motor still have fly back voltage that has to be clamped. You may not need to install a diode in the fan, but I can guarantee you that this "inbuilt driver circuit" has such a diode.
And if you read the linked thread a bit more you'd see where they test it and it does produce -100V at shutdown. If there wasn't a flyback diodes it'd be burning out ic's left and right
As mentioned by another commenter, many of the compounds in WD-40 “dry” out, either by evaporation or oxidation (turning to lacquer/sticky goo like what you find in the oven). WD-40 is meant for penetration and water displacement, not desirable for achieving long term lubrication.
An example of something better to use is 3-In-One Multipurpose or Motor Oil.
Another FYI is that oils break down grease, which is found in bearings (WD-40 aggressively so), so it’s not generally desirable to apply oil to bearings, unless it’s already having issues and you just need some additional life out of it.
"If the fan is very old and no longer works properly, it just needs to be replaced. "
Sometimes it is really complicated replacing them with a danger of damaging stuff, if you have no routine. Then using something to spray is easier to fix it for some time. It helped in my cases, even though I will definitely try something else next time ..
I used to frequent overclocking forums and at the time a lot of this was crazy custom work instead of purpose built cooling products or things like water cooling AiO setups. I remember people building intakes into their window so the computer case sucked in cold winter air from outdoors. There was even a guy that installed a homemade water cooling setup and had the reservoir tank outdoors and piped through the window. I think the later had a real risk of freezing if his folding at home rig stopped working on very cold days.
I mostly just installed insanely loud tornado fans myself, which were in style at the time. This was before building a quiet PC was on anyone's radar it seemed.
Ive done that. I am doing that. Using the outdoors as a natural heatsink isnt crazy. In a couple months it will be -30 outside my window. Why should my computer fans whirl around constanly using 20c indoor air when literally inches away there exists and unlimited supply of -30c outdoor air? Some simple water cooling parts, a 30$ heat exchanger and a little radiator fluid. Net result is lower temps and significantly lower noise. The only practical problem is consensation, but with dew points of -30c even indoors that isnt much of a worry.
It's a neat hack but I have to wonder whether the hole through which you pass through the pipes leaks more heat energy to the outside than the fans take to run on an all-indoor system.
Plus, in the winter, you get "free" heating by running the machine completely indoors. Not actually free of course, but free as a side-effect of using the machine for other tasks. Had a friend who tried splitting his electrical service off into a cheaper heat-rate branch to run his bitcoin mining rigs and claimed they were the same as a space heater. I don't think the power company bought it.
I had this idea but never executed because it's only bitter cold outside for about 3 months out of the year. And then I'd basically be doing a semi-annual detachment/attachment of my PC from the wall and probably removing/adding an insert from a window for the other end of the loop.
This combined with my roughly 4 month itch to rearrange my office made it seem like much more of a pain in the ass than it was worth to ever actually do.
I've done it a few times. I find that seasonal temperature changes are not as much of an issue as I first thought. Automotive radiator fluid basically never freezes. And once you have a coolant loop running outside, your options are far greater. Even radiators are a unnecessary. I once has a coolant loop run outside to 20-gallon washtub sitting on the ground under a wood deck. No radiators or fans. The entire rig cost less than 100$. Just a tiny aquarium pump pushing water up the loop into the house. The tub was in thermal contact with the ground and was so massive that it took many hours for my computer to warm it up even in high summer.
I would assume folks would use antifreeze when doing sub-zero liquid cooling, that would prevent issues in all but extreme cold. It would have a bit of an impact on heat transfer though...
Though, at 40 F, you could have put on some socks, shoes, shorts and a t-shirt and sat outside, instead of peering out through the window in your underwear.
Or, were you fully clothed and this was in Florida or something?
(I half joke, but when it warms up to 40 F again in the Spring, in Minnesota we break out the t-shirts, if not shorts.)
I have done this. Many years ago I was forced to work with a terrible laptop. It was one of those Dell 5cm thick things that were basically cramming a desktop cpu and gpu into someting that looked like someone had bolted a second box undeneeth a standard laptop. Fans ofc screeming loudly all day. So I had the brilliant idea to just run everyting of an external drive so that when I could work from home, I could seamlessly switch to a better computer.
Now the powerbrick for the laptop from hell was also huge and heavy (I remember the total package was over 4.5 kg, and the battery lasted 80 minutes when new, so you always needed wallpower), but it had the exact with and lenght of the exteral drive cage. So fancy me had the great idea that when I tidied up my desk putting the drive on top of the powerbrick, ofc neatly allingned with the desk edges, looked perfect.
Perfect until the drive crashed hard due to being right on top of the very hot powerbrick. All code was checked into subversion, but the 127 pages of a product manual I had been writing the last week were gone without backup.
Having come across the freezer method, I decided to give it a try. Nicely sealed in a ziplock freezer bag, I left the drive in overnight. Tried booting it up the next morning without success. Put it back in the freezer on a whim, but had to start writing the manual anew and forgot a out the drive.
I came across the drive again while fetching some peas from the freezer a few weeks later. Gave it another try, and lo and behold, it worked!
Learned my lesson about excess heat on drives and no nightly backups though, so never needed this procedure again.
Pro tip: Install the cables on the drive before putting it in the freezer inside the ziplock bag. Close the bag with duct tape or something to stop air getting in. Then when you take it out to use it, keep the drive in the bag and just plug in the cables. Keeping the frozen drive in the bag will prevent the instant condensation the moment you remove it from the freezer.
Double pro tip (I've done this): Forget the freezer. Put the drive a bag, with cables hanging out. Then immerse the drive/bag in a bucket of ice water. That keeps it cool even while being used. Just be careful to keep the cables away from the water. Last time I did this I used a garbage bag large enough that I didn't need to seal anything.
Once I worked in a small office and we used ancient but silent servers and we needed new ones. We had a rack in one of the rooms, so without thinking I bought two new rack servers. Worst decision ever.
They were screaming loud. You could hear them in all the offices. Temperature in that room went up to 45°C. In the end we could store them somewhere in a closet and ignore the noise.
The massive noise difference between brands, models, and generations of rack servers is astounding to me. I have five rack servers in my house, not in a closet. Three are Dell R620s, one is a Supermicro X9, and one is a Supermicro X11. The Dells are 1Us and by all rights should be screamers, but they aren't. The Supermicros are 2Us, and while they weren't screamers, they were loud enough that on the one that's on 24/7 (the X11), I swapped the PSUs for quieter models, the CPU fan for a Noctua, and throttled the case fans. When the X9 boots up to ingest ZFS snapshots, you can definitely tell it's there.
I used to think the R620s being bizarrely quiet was because homelab loads are understandably small, but then one day I got well over half the cores to 100% sustained doing something, and it didn't get any louder. I know they _can_ get loud, because at boot the fans go to 100%.
I grew up in a city with temp reaching 48 Celsius in the summer
Of course this wasn’t very good for electronic devices and hence every console I bought died with a year of over heating.
For my PS2 I managed to extend the lifetime by placing big blocks of ice in a tray underneath it and the console sitting on top on a rack to avoid contact.
I had to replace the ice every hour but the system worked well enough till the console died eventually of water damage.
When I was a kid I had an laptop that would overheat when playing age of empires. So I had a bicycle pump setup under my desk so I could quickly blow in some air every 3-4 minutes... If I was to late or forgot the whole thing would just die and all game progress was lost. I remember laughing at the whole situation whenever I had to pump in air.
At some point I bought one of those laptop stand with built-in fans.
Thanks for reminding me of those good old days :-)
I love this story. As an adult the thought of stopping every few minutes to manually cool your computer is insufferable, I would rather just not play on that laptop. But yeah, as a kid, I could see myself perhaps having done this.
Even with a hot ambient temperature, you can still keep your devices at a safe temperature by increasing air flow with large external fans. You need larger air flow because you'll saturate the air quicker, and you have less thermal run-off (close to max temperatures).
Towards the end of the life of my NES it started to overheat after maybe an hour of use. I remember being very stressed trying to defeat bosses in legend of zelda and save as quickly as possible. For whatever reason, mild graphical corruption would start to appear for awhile prior the system resetting itself so I usually knew I didn't have much time left.
If I were smarter I probably would have just disassembled the NES and cleaned it but I was a dumb kid at the time so I just lived with it.
When I was a kid, I modified my (shitty, generic beige) case by cutting a hole on top, mounting a 120mm fan, and ducting it with PVC dryer duct to fit over the CPU's HSF (which I think was an Athlon XP 2000+). Airflow dynamics aside, it worked like a charm, and knocked the CPU temps down to ambient.
In 2020, I was doing a lot of video encoding on my Surface Book in India in ambient temperatures in the range 25–35°C, and I found that lying its heat source down on a marble floor sped it up by 60% within a minute or so, the floor acting as a large heatsink.
(I also learned that the Surface Book has a dedicated “I have shut down because I overheated and must cool down before I will start up again” screen (an illustration of a thermometer), which I wouldn’t expect most computers to have, though I think I’ve only caused thermal shutdown one other time; during Hyderabad summer, recording in the late afternoon in an upper room, the ambient temperature got as high as 45°C, and there wasn’t enough thermal headroom for throttling to save it, so it needed extra makeshift external heatsinks. I quoted 25–35°C in the first paragraph because I was doing the actual editing overnight when it was somewhat cooler.)
Why? It occurs naturally in italy and some other country. Its just a material. One that is easily damaged by accidic cleaners, so not the luxery it sounds.
Never seen this done to a whole laptop, but it wasn't an uncommon last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD back in the days of spinning platters.
Preferably in a zip lock vacuum bag and left over night.
This is a 17 year old article, but I'm a little skeptical that 10 minutes in the fridge whilst still in the laptop would have made much difference. Probably the forced reboot did just as much.
There was also the opposite direction: Putting a drive that's locked up in an oven on low heat to unstick the drive-head.... I knew someone who had to do that ~30 years ago after a long-running server had a power failure and the head had stuck to the platter as it cooled.
This was back when opening the drive itself up to figure out what was wrong was still reasonably unlikely to make things worse (I know that first hand from having "kickstarted" my own drive every morning for months while saving up for a new one by opening it up and nudging the platter)
Ive recovered a few drives through the freezer trick. It took a lot though. Freezer for an hour, use until lock, freezer for two hours, then rinse and repeat until data recovered completely. Doesnt have to be overnight, just long enough to get the metal to contract, and theres a point where that change no longer happens and keeping it in the freezer is only wasting time.
On the topic of reflowing in your home oven.. **DONT**!!!!! Thats how you get metal poisoning or other non fun diseases. If you plan on reflowing, use an oven that can go to the scrap yard after, or that will be dedicated solely to reflow. Reflowing can cause vaporization of metals in the solder and the chemicals from flux, etc, and thats just not fun to eat.
You're absolutely right about the health risks. Additionally, a small oven can be bought online for under $/£/€50 in most countries, and there are many guides online about modifying these to have precise temperature control for delicate soldering jobs. These modifications use inexpensive (usually <€1 each) thermocouples, along with digitally controlled relays or MOSFETs to do pulse-width modulation.
I have also tried the Laptop baking many years ago with an ancient Dell Laptop which was known for its buggy internal Nvidia GPU.
However, I have learned in the meantime that lead-free solder requires temperatures much higher than achieved by baking PCBs in a literal kitchen oven.
Is there an explanation why this method is nevertheless so popular (maybe even successfull)?
I remember getting my 9800 GT GPU to work a bit longer this way.
I was playing Mount & Blade back then, but noticed that the polygons would glitch out (e.g. vertices in random locations instead of where they should have been, like stretched out 3D models), shortly after which there would be screen artifacts (random colored pixels) and it would all freeze. After that, the PC would fail to boot.
I took the GPU out, propped it up on some tin foil balls, put it into the oven on over 210 C for a while and after that it would start working again. Seems like something was wrong with the card though, because eventually the temperatures would get to 90-100 C and it would crash, but until that point I put it in the oven like 3-4 times and it seemed to work for a little bit every single time.
After that I replaced it with a GTX 650, which still runs to this day in a now friend's computer.
The PS3 issue described in the video was more specific to it, but similar in it's nature.
TLDR from my very imperfect memory:
The whole board-solder-chip sandwich expands at different rates due to heat, so internal stress and cracks develop in solder joints, which makes them fail. Baking PCB in an oven does something like making the crack close a bit, so that the solder joint works again.
Problem is, neither the crack, nor the internal stress that has been built up is gone, so the solution actually doesn't last.
I can say from experiencing, 20 mins in the freezer for a bare 3.5 or 2.5 HDD would give about 5 mins of "quick, find important stuff" time...
>_last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD_
Before pulling it apart and and putting the platters in an identical donor drive. (Dam IBM DEATHSTAR drives back in the day!)
>I can say from experiencing, 20 mins in the freezer for a bare 3.5 or 2.5 HDD would give about 5 mins of "quick, find important stuff" time...
Well that's just pulled up a few traumas I'd forgot I'd buried. Gawd, that repeated "race against time" of that 5 minutes when it's working. Knowing that every time you do the freezer/recover cycle, it's closer to straight-up never working again.
As to the fridge point, fridge vs. room temp probably wouldn't make much difference in what I glean of the scenario from a quick glance. It'd help a bit - would cool things a bit faster,* but, eh ... I wouldn't expect that to necessarily be a KEY element.
That written, temperature may still have been quite important (i.e., reboot alone wouldn't help). Particularly with a device containing something like spinning platters (as well as potentially extra heat generation associated with certain failure modes), and the additional factor of laptop heat load trade-offs, ... simply having the laptop off for some minutes might have been essential. In fact, the writer notes that transfer stopped during the first attempt to retrieve the data (after 10 minutes in fridge), hence a second round of 20 minutes was carried out after which the remaining data was retrieved.
The fact that that second pause was 20 minutes AND was carried out in a fridge may have had little to no role in success the second time. To me, that's something like a 50-50 odds event ... particularly with this kind of infrequent (for an individual, hopefully) 'high-terror' n=1 event / 'data'.** It may have primarily been the difference between having transferred other files prior to transferring that (last? not checking that detail) file vs. not.
* Newton said proportional to temperature difference, but that's a rather rough guide in general for this sort of scenario - even with just basic details missing here
** I.e., where most people aren't too interested in carrying out any kind of more detailed post-mortem ... most are much more interested in leaving the terror part behind.
Edit: OTOH, one should not discount the power of belief out-of-hand - i.e., 'externum-placebo' or something to that effect, if you please (my verbum fabulists will know). As a certain purveyor of cheap movie-branded trinkets once said in response to the soft and breathless exclamation of "I don't believe it!": "That ... is why you fail."
(Though I may be mixing up my little Gs from movies ...)
In any case, the fridge may have had more of an effect than my crudely rational analysis above suggests. {In any case}^2, this entirely unnecessary but necessary addendum will conclude with - ha ha, but, also, serious.
When I was ~11ish I found my desktop was overheating quite regularly. The solution I came up with on my $0 dollar budget was to pop the side of the case off and point a box fan into it. Worked like a charm…for a while.
I did this a lot as a kid, up to the point where I just didn’t care about having a case anymore. I completely removed the whole thing and put it on top of a rubber plate, and covered it after use with an old horizontal metal case from a 486 or something. I loved how confused my mother and then later my girlfriend would look when they saw me working/gaming in that total barebones setup. To be honest I have very fond memories of it and would definitely do it again if I didn’t have two small kids!
My current desktop setup uses a mining rig frame and tends to get the same confused looks from people.
I have it setup that way because there are no motherboard options for my CPU which allow for sufficient spacing between two triple slot GPUs to provide adequate airflow.
Yup. I tried this on a whim on a self assembled AMD K6 and it worked. Without that 'fix', compiling the Linux kernel would fail. Compiling the kernel and making GNU Chess play itself at highest levels were my standard stress tests.
This box wasnt completely self assembled in the sense the CPU was already mounted on the motherboard. Redoing the heat sink with thermal paste fixed the problem, mostly.
Reallyt didn't think it would work. And when it acctually did, I was sure it would only be a temporary solution. Much to my surprise, it's still going strong today (mostly used as an Octoprint server for my 3d printer.)
Reminds me of a time that a friend of a friend had me attempt to reflow an old laptop with a $20 heat gun. HP DV6000 or a 9000, if anybody remembers those failure rates. He had two.
I'd worked in a warranty depot and had some experience with the tear down by then.
The reflow didn't work for us, but we did manage to make one of the two functional again.
I once had an issue with my LG5 phone who entered in a boot-loop (also a common issue with LG4). I don't have a head gun, so I put it in the mainboard of the cell phone in oven for maybe 10 min at 150°C to reflow the soldering. At least I could reboot the cell phone and copy the important files. But after about an hour, it enter again the in boot loop and was broken for good.
I normally solder at 300C-350C, I can't imagine under 200 reflowing the solder, especially without contact. I have a cheap hot air rework station that I run at 400C-450C (or so it claims) and it is still quite difficult to get anything molten with it (except nearby plastic that I forgot to cover in kapton).
Maybe the closed space has some advantages that make up for the lower temp.
My laptop was once heated inside it's case, it was hard to touch it. I don't know how it didn't explode, it was so hot I decided to put it in THE FREEZER. I thought I'd leave it there for 5-6 minutes, but I fell asleep and forgot it THE ENTIRE NIGHT. 7-8 hours. In the morning I panicked as I remembered what I have done. It then had a black screen for a few minutes and I thought I was drowning in my stupidity, but later it worked like a charm. Conclusion - laptops are fine in the freezer.
I dont understand how come condensation while de-freezing didn't damaged the components, but if you spill a bit of water in the keybord might damage the laptop,
Smaller world, I also used to work with him. And just recently used the fridge trick on an old dying hard drive (it worked fwiw), but don't remember if he was the source of why I thought that might work.
Ooh I have a related story. My brother dropped his phone and cracked his screen and damaged some internal components as well. Sometimes the screen just wouldn't turn on, but the touchscreen would work. I told him to get a new one and he said no, this one is fine, he just has to throw it in the freezer for about 2 minutes at the start of each day. After a few minutes of freezing, the screen actually turned on. I thought it would eventually warm up and need refreezing again, but sure enough, it stayed on for the whole day.
I guess there is some circuit that determines if the screen comes on or not, but if it's already on, it won't switch it off, so he just disabled auto-lock and avoided the lock button all day.
My next question was how he figured it out. He lives in a cold climate area and his phone screen would consistently work whenever he walked to the store, and consistently not work when he was at home. Eventually he realized it was the temperature that made it work. I've seen stuff about computers in the freezer, etc, but there's something funnier about needing a quick freeze and it's good until you lock it again.
I've done this once. I got a laptop from a new company that was really shitty, but I had hopes that running Gentoo with some nasty CFLAGS would make it usable. However, the thing would heat a lot when compiling the base system and would crash in the middle of the installation.
Fair enough! I put it in the fridge and ran the installation from there. It concluded without issues and the laptop was MUCH faster than with a "normal" Linux distro. (I don't think this kind of big performance difference holds up on modern machines though).
I guess that is meaningful in a location with higher ambient temperatures. Here we just open up the computer a bit and aim a big table-fan at it for better cooling :-)
Well you know the old adage : Gentoo is compiled for your computer in its condition so that’s why it’s fast. Here the Gentoo was baked in excellent atmospheric condition so that’s why it was an awesome install, configured for coolness :)
I think it was Debian with i386 packages. Compiling with Gentoo targeting my CPU and not a generic i386 machine made things much faster for such a crappy device.
It's just that for recent distributions, if you have a reasonably common and modern CPU, you already get most of the optimizations you need in the pre-compiled packages.
A friend would do this with his Apple M1 laptop when we would play something online. He'd take some frozen fresh cheese out of the freezer (in a plastic bag) and put it under the laptop. Otherwise, his framerate would crater. Sometimes, in winter, he'd put a coat on, open the window, and play with the laptop on the window sill. Apple laptops tend to be slim and silent, but their thermals always seem to pay the price.
so I assume he has the M1 laptop with no cooling, the basic macbook?
Because I have a M1 max macbook pro, and it never gets hot ever. It also never really makes any noise.
My main game is cities skylines and civ 6. Don't know if those are not that intense since they are quite some years old. But I dont need to resort to crazy stuff like your comment.
Pretty sure the M1 MacBook Air will thermal throttle if you give it a sustained load for more than a couple minutes. I also have a Pro and am really impressed by its thermals—the fan only ever spins up under the heaviest of sustained loads, and it's whisper quiet when it does.
This has to be the Air, because that one is passively cooled. I also use it and in the hot summer I've got 2 fans. One to cool me down, and one to cool my laptop down.
Still love the thing, so small, light and convenient while traveling. The few days it is hot here I can run another fan :-)
- HP laserprinter motherboards, 2 of them, one just a few days out of warranty. After a few minutes in the oven they went on to work for years and might still do so for all I know.
- HP JetDirect cards, 3 of them. All worked fine after baking, one of them needed a second bake after about a year. One of those is still in use, the other 2 got fried by lightning strikes - that was before I installed a surge protector in front of the fuse box.
- HP DV6000 motherboard, it worked for a number of years after that and probably still does, the LCD display eventually died which was the end for that piece of plasticky garbage
Notice a trend? HP seems to have had problems during the introduction of the RoHS directive [1].
- Asus something-or-other laptop motherboard, still works, one of the SoDIMMs died which left it with only 2 GB and it got retired
- PSU board for a 24" Hyundai monitor, still works and is hooked up as second monitor to the...
- Apple "Late 2009 27" iMac" graphics card, still works after the first bake, I'm using that machine (running Debian) as my main workstation.
The oven and the BGA reworkstation have saved a lot of equipment from early retirement, both at places I worked as well as here. I just repaired the PSU board for a HP (again HP...) 2910ag switch even though I could have swapped it on warranty because replacing a transistor and resistor is much quicker than going through the motions of a warranty replacement and to be honest also just because I can and to be even more honest because I only found out about the 100 year warranty on these switches after I had already fixed it...
>Notice a trend? HP seems to have had problems during the introduction of the RoHS directive [1].
It wasn't just them. I got an old Sony PVM-8044Q from an auction a year or two ago that was stuck displaying black and white on one of its inputs. Apparently a known[0] problem. I took off the case and located the general area of the PCB said to have issues and reflowed the solder of a few points with my iron. Color worked after that!
Back in the day, our IT guy in his 70’s pulled this trick on someone’s hard drive to recover a critical last minute presentation. The story became a staple of office parties. See you on the other side John.
We had a problem with a robot overheating here in denmark and we had a fridge in the office. We tried to make a copper heatsink but it was still struggling, and so to keep it working so we could develop on other issues, we had a cycle of putting leverpostej from the fridge on it for 30 minutes before replacing it with another. It had the bonus of heating the leverpostej for a nice lunch lol.
I sometimes idly wonder about harvesting the heat from various components, like we're Apollo astronauts getting every last smidgen of efficiency from our craft. In my daydream, I have wall sockets for dumping heat back into the house from, for example, the fridge, or the excess heat from the oven. I know it's not at all practical, but the idea of a hyper-efficient home is deeply appealing to me :)
That's a really fun idea. I always loved the concept of circular systems, terrariums and the like. I'd love to try and do the calculations to get oxygen-neutral with the plants in my house vs my own exhaled breath, or treat and reuse water on a local level.
Leverpostej is the most disgusting thing in Danish cuisine. Just the smell of it heating up in the oven gives me nausea, while Danes start drooling in anticipation.
I remember back when Macbooks had issues with their temperature sensor. They would die due to the sensor cable being too short and everything expanding when the laptop got hot. Apple later resolved this with a firmware update.
Anyway, I got asked if I could fix a Macbook that was turning itself off. Sure, that's probably just performing the firmware update. But when I got the Macbook, it turned off just moments after starting OSX.
I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes and tried booting it again, yup, this time it took longer before it would turn itself off. I put it back in the freezer for a few hours. Booted it, started the firmware update, praying that it wouldn't turn itself off. Everything went successful and after that the laptop worked perfectly!
I used to do this on the 2019? 16" Intel MacBook Pro when doing heavy rust/flutter compiles. It was more thermally limited than power limited, so doing a compile while outside the fridge would draw ~40w, doing a compile inside the fridge would draw ~120w. I eventually just bought a Mac Pro since I was worried about condensation killing it, but in the mean time it worked pretty well!
My pre-M1 x86 Macbook Pro would overheat so badly and grind to a halt, that once I had a Zoom meeting scheduled that I could not miss, so I took a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer, and rubbed them on the bottom of the Mac until it cooled down enough to run Zoom. I made the meeting in time, but it ruined the peas, though.
I often make the bottom of my laptop slightly wet so it can evaporate and cool it. My parents think it’s a bad idea but I think if I don’t get it inside the laptop it should be fine?
Since everyone is sharing their similar stories - I had a dell laptop at boarding school and by my senior year it was on its last legs. My friends played a lot of League of Legends and my laptop would overheat, cut off, and my friends would lament that I went afk for the 5 min it took to reboot and relaunch the game. So naturally I started wrapping an ice pack in a washcloth and placing that under my laptop whenever I played a game. Was always nervous about water damage but I luckily was able to avoid that.
I worked at a place (early '90s) where the server room was full of (some sort of) Sun machines and a legacy Symbolics Lisp machine. One day the server room's aircon failed and the Sun machines started to die for no obvious reason. The Symbolics was the only thing with a thermometer and its console error messages (complaining about the heat) were the clue that revealed what was going on.
Putting electronics in a fridge may work sometimes, but it may also cause irreversible damage if you're unlucky. The biggest threat to electronics is not just temperature but also moisture. Cooling the air captured inside a laptop may cause water to condense on electronic components and may cause subsequent short circuits, which may burn something irreversibly once powered on. Whether it happens depends on the relative humidity of the air you start with and the temperature delta. In dry areas this may be ok, but really don't try that method in tropics (or even in Europe in Summer - I can see condensation happening almost all the time in my fridge).
The air inside a fridge is really dry, simply because it is cold, but also because the heat exchanger inside has to be even colder in order to keep the fridge cold, and so all the condensation occurs on that. If you put a warm laptop inside a fridge, any moisture in the laptop will be sucked out by the dry fridge air and condensed on the fridge's heat exchanger.
However, it's when you take your cold laptop out of the fridge that it may get problems with moisture. If your laptop is colder than the dew point of the air, then the moisture will condense on it. To solve that, put the laptop into a sealed plastic bag while it warms up to stop the moist air getting to it (although this may be incompatible with actually running the laptop).
But in cases like the one in the article, the damage doesn't matter that much, no? Their highest priority were files, so they did what they could to save them. But yes, just putting a piece of electronic in the fridge for a test is very risky.
It’s funny but I’ve done something similar with putting my laptop into the oven for a short period as it wasn’t getting any charge at all and I guessed after trying everything lose that the board where the power connector was misbehaving.
It actually worked after but it was pure luck I think.
Another time I did it with a graphics card that had been overclocked and definitely was having some board issues, took it apart and did the same, it seemed to reseat the solder and it was working fine for a few months after but obviously none of these are long term solutions, but it’s interesting the major impact temperatures will have on your hardware!
Did that with an old Thinkpad (X32 iirc) years ago. I use Gentoo and some packages (like gcc) could only be compiled during winter months or in a fridge.
Also sucessfully rescued some old NVidia card with baking oven around that time…
Reverse of this - I still have a MacBookPro 2011 with a dedicated GPU that suffered from brittle lead free solder issue, where I had to wrap the laptop up in a blanket for 30 mins to over heat it, soften the solder around the GPU to allow it to boot into OSX…. Then once there I could then switch to iGPU and use the Amphetamine app the keep it awake/never sleep.
If I needed to shut down I’d need to repeat this overheating process again.
Laptop still works to this day though I had a guy in the UK install a new dGPU with leaded solder.
Keeping a running laptop in the freezer will keep it cool for a little, but eventually cause it to overheat. Refrigerators are good thermal insulators, but they work just as well at trapping heat as keeping it away (similar to your coffee mug). A running laptop is constant source of heat, whereas the freezer only gradually cools, relying on "trapping the cold" in.
I had an old Galaxy smartphone that had some kind of thermal issue. It would constantly run hot, and, god forbid it should run out of batteries, would only start after it had been lightly chilled in the freezer. When it was running it performed okay but I ended up replacing it because it wasn't exactly reliable in an emergency situation.
I had an iPhone 4S that would often lose wifi connectivity. But if I cooled it down in the fridge for a while it would stay connected for longer.
(Would want it off when in the fridge otherwise the battery life would get obliterated. Presumably from looking for signal but it did also sometimes die abruptly on very cold winter days.)
I got a free XBOX in 2004 via this method. Keeping the HDD cold allowed it to work for a few minutes at a time so I was able to softmod the console and extract the drive-specific key. Then XboxHDM could prep a replacement drive. A modchip would have been way easier but those cost money :)
I was playing HoMM2 one day, saved a game and try to reload only to find out the my save file was nowhere to be found. It all went downhill from there: Files reported saved, but no longer there after reboot, other data inconsistencies. Norton Utilities for DOS didn't do anything to help and at the end my PC did not boot anymore.
It seemed like a problem with the spindles or the head. I wasn't quite sure as a kid. Desperate, I tried the only other option I could think of - dismounted the hdd and dropped it from several inches high. To my astonishment that did work and by repeating that procedure now and then, I was able to squeeze at least a month or two out of my Quantum before it finally gave up.
I one needed to run a photoshop script to remove automatically the background from thousands of products image. The script was relatively simple, but my laptop at the time kept overheating so i put it outside.. let me tell you that montreal winter is cooler than a fridge!
Hrrm. I've had a similar experience but with opposite outcome.
Edit: There's also the trick about reseating chips by warming the motherboard in the oven, or something along those lines. Never could get my parents to let me try that one out.
i once repaired a macbook pro, around 2011, which didnt boot anymore with a towel, blocking the vents and constantly powering it on until, it overheated. it must have been enough to bridge a broken solder point. Took 5 Mintues. Worked for some hours to get the important client data and project files off of it.
the idea came to me after the ibook gpu problems which i repaired with a manipulated tealight (3 flames) placing on the gpu, having the ibook upside down, and also turning it on all the time (it directly went off) until it worked for ever.
i was a broke student at that time and loved McGyver growing up when i was a kid.
I assume it had a discrete gpu in it, which caused issues with stability.
I fixed mine by putting the gpu in the oven for a few hours. Continued to work for a few months. Then i did it again, and it worked again for a few weeks. Couldnt fix it a third time though
I think this is genius tbh. If you're faced with the prospect of losing important data and feeling silly for trying something so unorthodox I know which one I'd prefer. I've also seen videos on YouTube where repair technicians are able to temporarily fix broken (clicking) hard drives by giving them a good flick with their finger. It seems like magic to me. I've had a hard drive fail recently and I wish I knew about these methods. I wonder if there's any other hacks that might work for saving failing drives?
The freezer also works if you need to power on a cell phone without associating it with a cell tower.
(Why would I do this? I found a cellphone and needed to break into it to figure out whose it was. If the guy had a new phone under the same IMEI, it would have knocked him off the network. Eventually, I found out when I finally busted into it and tracked down his identity, he had since enlisted in the Marines and there wasn't anything he probably was missing on that phone anyways)
Several friends of mine and I were known to leave our laptops running Gentoo in the freezer with the power cords in for really large software builds many many years ago.
Meanwhile, on an older macbook air (still with SSD, so I thought no problem, the fan won't need to engage for a while anyway), I didn't need to fix anything, but once had it in the trunk of a car at -25C. When I went to turn it on it was not happy with me at all.
Had to wait for it to warm up closer to ambient to function normally.
Same happened to me with a phone. (nexus 5x). It stopped working all the sudden during a vacation.
Putting in the freezer would allow me to boot it and backup the data. Fridge was not enough as it was not cold enough to dissipate the heat of the device on boot.
As soon as the phone was out of the freezer it would die in about 30 seconds.
... because the fridge (and the microwave) are the best pseudo-Faraday cages available to shield EM radiation in most domestic situations - and the microwave it tooo scary for a laptop.
... because the fridge is the last place most burglars look [citation needed].
When my laptop was getting extremely overheated during certain intensive computation (not necessary having drive issues) I used to grab a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, put an extra ziplock around it to prevent moisture, and pop it under my computer. Worked like a charm to bring the temp down and get through the crunch.
The best one I ever saw was someone took a few gallons of 3M non-conductive liquid, put a working 486 motherboard in the bucket, put the bucket in the freezer, then overclocked it until it burned up.
They got an impressive overclock out of it, for a few seconds. lol
I had a laptop which had a faulty memory module, it was working quite well after I put it in the fridge for some reason. Also linux at the time would have kernel panics while freebsd would have some application crashes, but would keep running.
i would do this with cell phone batteries constantly like Note 1 back in the day.
Back when I'd carry an extra battery because they were swappable and was an easy way to get a 80% ish charge on the go without what was then a poor quality power bank.
I tried resoldering a laptop in an oven once in 2007ish. Sadly it only worked a very short time, like, maybe got the boot screen (I don't quite remember) and it uh was not in good shape. Dumb things you do in college
I have done this. My work laptop is prone to overheating under heavy workloads, and the fastest way to get it back to operating temperature is to stick in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes. Works every time.
I did this once with a client's machine at the rinky-dink data center I used to work at. The breakroom fridge kept his server going long enough for us to get his data off.
Yeah that was the plan. I was using "schedule" in a bit looser sense.
My thought was that a Raspberry pi notices the flow and triggers an Apache airflow dataset every 10 sec or so while it's still flowing. DAGs which consume that "dataset" (a misnomer in this case) will run. Flow stops, DAGs stop.
Each time I would try the system would overheat and then crash. The existing (windows) system still appeared to work fine with light loads so I was pretty sure I just needed to get past the install and decided to try one more time.
It was winter at the time, I can't remember if it had snowed recently, but I think it was probably close to 40 degrees F outside. So I hooked up a wired keyboard and mouse, and then plopped the laptop outside on the deck and closed the door with only the keyboard and mouse inside. There was a window which I could see the screen through and start the install.
Sure enough with the natural winter cooling the install completed and I was able to use the laptop for a few more years.