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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)

#51
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.)

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

#52

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…

Hilarious imagery!!! Thanks for sharing.

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

#53
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.

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

#54
post #38
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?

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 :)

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

#55

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 seamle…

> but the 127 pages of a product manual I had been writing the last week were gone without backup.

This hurts just reading it. How'd it go in the end?

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

#56

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…

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!

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

#57
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…

Did condensation not pose a problem? Not just immediate shorts, but perhaps corrosion and the laptop dying earlier than expected.

You get condensation when you move from a cold environment to a hot one. When your piece of equipment is colder than the surrounding air's dew point.

So you need to worry about condensation, when you take the equipment out of the fridge at the end.

(Where I live now, our dew point is typically at 24C throughout the day. So anything at or below that temperature collects water. That's about 75F.)

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

#58

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…

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.

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

#59
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 :)

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

#60
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!

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