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
Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
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Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#12I 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 took a few RROD Xbox 360's and revived them (for a while) by baking them in the oven with the capacitors insulated.
I reckon across 3 boxes I did this to, I eked out a couple hundred more hours of use.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#13When i needed to cool down a laptop, i used gel ice packs.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#14I 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.)
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#15I 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.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#16Never 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. On the other…
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.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#17Small world, I used to work with this guy.
If you're reading this Adam, they never got back to me on the W2. I ended up having to call the corporate headquarters.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#18If I could go back in time and tell the author about rsync, this delightful post wouldn’t exist.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#19The reliability of computer parts is quite remarkable compared to the past.
I'd expect this to be a less useful trick these days. Not sure.
Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)
#20I used to overclock my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop and putting it into a mini fridge helped keep the Prescott P4 running cool for benchmarks.