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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)

#71

Post by looping8 »

pkolaczk wrote: post #62

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 relati…

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.

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

#72

Post by Scoundreller »

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.

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

#73

Post by srean »

alex_lav wrote: post #40
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…

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by vidarh »

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…

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)

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

#75

Post by darkwater »

alex_lav wrote: post #40
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…

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.

Ahahah did the same with an AMD Athlon that was overheating and hanging a lot at my first job in a very scrappy company (but I was 20!)

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

#76

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

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

#77

Post by sergioisidoro »

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.

Saved all the vacation pictures this way

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

#79

Post by hollander »

PeterStuer wrote: post #41

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…

> Fans ofc screeming loudly all day.

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.

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

#80

Post by zoltrix303 »

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!
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