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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)

#111

Post by bonton89 »

tforcram wrote: post #50

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 pr…

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.

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#112

Post by bloopernova »

RugnirViking wrote: post #99

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.

That's hilarious!

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 :)

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#113

Post by aketchum »

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.

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#114

Post by bonton89 »

umarniz wrote: post #67

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…

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.

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#115

Post by edude03 »

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!

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#116

Post by haolez »

eru wrote: post #38
haolez wrote: post #21

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…

What's a 'normal' Linux distro for comparison? Do you mean one that ships binaries, or perhaps one that also enables a GUI by default?

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.

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#117

Post by mhandley »

davesmylie wrote: post #7

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. On the other…

I did that baking-the-motherboard last-resort trick on a Mac Mini three years ago. https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1245730555846635520

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.)

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#118

Post by dansalvato »

dacryn wrote: post #85
dmos62 wrote: post #82

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.

Re: Adam? ... is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? (2006)

#120

Post by sandworm101 »

bonton89 wrote: post #111
tforcram wrote: post #50

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 pr…

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…

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.
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