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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)

#91

Post by ayx »

permo-w wrote: post #86
chrismorgan wrote: post #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 illustr…

where were you working that had a marble floor?

Marble flooring in homes is quite common in India.

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

#93

Post by opan »

kwertzzz wrote: post #58
doubled112 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#94

Post by mnw21cam »

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…

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).

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

#95

Post by opan »

the_third_wave wrote: post #34

Things I've baked which worked: - 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…

>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!

[0] https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-8044q

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

#97

Post by KronisLV »

cl3misch wrote: post #31
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 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.

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

#98

Post by hakonhaki »

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.

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

#99

Post by RugnirViking »

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.

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

#100

Post by CableNinja »

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…

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.

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