18 ms·

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

337 points by vikrum 3y ago

itsthecourier 3y ago
Why does this happen?
- prettyStandard 3y ago
  Maybe metal contracts at lower temperatures and thus the drive head is able to move with less friction. I will be trying this if I ever experience it. I don't have computer hardware fail that often.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  Shrinkage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  It doesn't; the whole thing is an urban legend. Goes like this: Try copying files, fails. Try copying files, fails. Try copying files, fails. Put laptop / drive in fridge. Try copying files, fails. Works. "Hey, putting it in the fridge worked!" Nope..it worked because they kept trying. People who comment on things like components shrinking don't understand how hard drives work.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Someone needs to brush up on their material science.
orbisvicis 3y ago
Hrrm. I've had a similar experience but with opposite outcome. Edit: There's also the trick about reseating chips by warming the motherboard in the oven, or something along those lines. Never could get my parents to let me try that one out.
tguvot 3y ago
my wife had lg g4 that develop overheat boot problem: by the time it booted it was overheated enough to reboot itself. in order to get everything off the phone i froze it in freezer. it gave me enough time to boot it and copy everything via usb
davesmylie 3y ago
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 end of the heat spectrum, there's baking a motherboard to reflow the solder: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6dygub/baked_motherboard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6dygu...
- doubled112 3y ago
  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.
  - kwertzzz 3y ago
    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.
    - opan 3y ago
      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.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
dougmwne 3y ago
Back in the day, our IT guy in his 70’s pulled this trick on someone’s hard drive to recover a critical last minute presentation. The story became a staple of office parties. See you on the other side John.
deleted 3y ago
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overgard 3y ago
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
- RajT88 3y ago
  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.
tehlike 3y ago
When i needed to cool down a laptop, i used gel ice packs.
- fifilura 3y ago
  Me too! Intel MacBook Pro combined with Microsoft teams meetings does this all the time for me. I have a gel ice pack in the frezer. When I put it under the laptop it cools down very quickly and I can work again.
wisemang 3y ago
I 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.)
spcebar 3y ago
I 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.
Zetaphor 3y ago
Small 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.
- LocalPCGuy 3y ago
  Smaller world, I also used to work with him. And just recently used the fridge trick on an old dying hard drive (it worked fwiw), but don't remember if he was the source of why I thought that might work.
  - r-s 3y ago
    Smaller smaller world - I work with him today!
jonhohle 3y ago
If I could go back in time and tell the author about rsync, this delightful post wouldn’t exist.
aaron695 3y ago
The 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.
birdyrooster 3y ago
I used to overclock my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop and putting it into a mini fridge helped keep the Prescott P4 running cool for benchmarks.
haolez 3y ago
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 a "normal" Linux distro. (I don't think this kind of big performance difference holds up on modern machines though).
- eru 3y ago
  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?
  - pjerem 3y ago
    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 :)
  - haolez 3y ago
    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.
    - eru 3y ago
      That makes sense. It's just that for recent distributions, if you have a reasonably common and modern CPU, you already get most of the optimizations you need in the pre-compiled packages.
- Scene_Cast2 3y ago
  Did condensation not pose a problem? Not just immediate shorts, but perhaps corrosion and the laptop dying earlier than expected.
widea 3y ago
Tried that a long long time ago with a failed harddisk, worked.
deleted 3y ago
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naet 3y ago
When my laptop was getting extremely overheated during certain intensive computation (not necessary having drive issues) I used to grab a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, put an extra ziplock around it to prevent moisture, and pop it under my computer. Worked like a charm to bring the temp down and get through the crunch.
quickthrower2 3y ago
What is the optimum temp? Maybe 4 degrees to avoid any moisture turning to ice. Or lower if you can really dry it out?
Brajeshwar 3y ago
Recover fail Hard Drives after keeping it in the Fridge. Ice packs on top of the routers. I thought these were common practices all along. :-)
the_third_wave 3y ago
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 I installed a surge protector in front of the fuse box. - HP DV6000 motherboard, it worked for a number of years after that and probably still does, the LCD display eventually died which was the end for that piece of plasticky garbage Notice a trend? HP seems to have had problems during the introduction of the RoHS directive [1]. - Asus something-or-other laptop motherboard, still works, one of the SoDIMMs died which left it with only 2 GB and it got retired - PSU board for a 24" Hyundai monitor, still works and is hooked up as second monitor to the... - Apple "Late 2009 27" iMac" graphics card, still works after the first bake, I'm using that machine (running Debian) as my main workstation. The oven and the BGA reworkstation have saved a lot of equipment from early retirement, both at places I worked as well as here. I just repaired the PSU board for a HP (again HP...) 2910ag switch even though I could have swapped it on warranty because replacing a transistor and resistor is much quicker than going through the motions of a warranty replacement and to be honest also just because I can and to be even more honest because I only found out about the 100 year warranty on these switches after I had already fixed it... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
- opan 3y ago
  >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 https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-8044q
kapitanjakc 3y ago
I did this for my cellphone, it got too hot to hold sometimes even when it was idle. Ironically it was from a company called "Lava" so ...
Uptrenda 3y ago
I think this is genius tbh. If you're faced with the prospect of losing important data and feeling silly for trying something so unorthodox I know which one I'd prefer. I've also seen videos on YouTube where repair technicians are able to temporarily fix broken (clicking) hard drives by giving them a good flick with their finger. It seems like magic to me. I've had a hard drive fail recently and I wish I knew about these methods. I wonder if there's any other hacks that might work for saving failing drives?
PeterStuer 3y ago
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 seamlessly switch to a better computer. Now the powerbrick for the laptop from hell was also huge and heavy (I remember the total package was over 4.5 kg, and the battery lasted 80 minutes when new, so you always needed wallpower), but it had the exact with and lenght of the exteral drive cage. So fancy me had the great idea that when I tidied up my desk putting the drive on top of the powerbrick, ofc neatly allingned with the desk edges, looked perfect. Perfect until the drive crashed hard due to being right on top of the very hot powerbrick. All code was checked into subversion, but the 127 pages of a product manual I had been writing the last week were gone without backup. Having come across the freezer method, I decided to give it a try. Nicely sealed in a ziplock freezer bag, I left the drive in overnight. Tried booting it up the next morning without success. Put it back in the freezer on a whim, but had to start writing the manual anew and forgot a out the drive. I came across the drive again while fetching some peas from the freezer a few weeks later. Gave it another try, and lo and behold, it worked! Learned my lesson about excess heat on drives and no nightly backups though, so never needed this procedure again.
- engineer_22 3y ago
  This kind of experience is hard to replicate therefore hard to learn without the suggestion, thanks for sharing
- fredrikholm 3y ago
  > 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?
  - q87b 3y ago
    > I came across the drive again while fetching some peas from the freezer a few weeks later. Gave it another try, and lo and behold, it worked!
mugivarra69 3y ago
either it was running buldozer cpu or intel's recent power reactor cpus
helb 3y ago
Did that with an old Thinkpad (X32 iirc) years ago. I use Gentoo and some packages (like gcc) could only be compiled during winter months or in a fridge. Also sucessfully rescued some old NVidia card with baking oven around that time…
timetraveller26 3y ago
I was expecting KDE compiling on Gentoo
tforcram 3y ago
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 probably close to 40 degrees F outside. So I hooked up a wired keyboard and mouse, and then plopped the laptop outside on the deck and closed the door with only the keyboard and mouse inside. There was a window which I could see the screen through and start the install. Sure enough with the natural winter cooling the install completed and I was able to use the laptop for a few more years.
- notfed 3y ago
  Hilarious imagery!!! Thanks for sharing.
- aizyuval 3y ago
  Download with some help from god. Haha
- bonton89 3y ago
  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.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    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.
chrismorgan 3y ago
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.)
- permo-w 3y ago
  where were you working that had a marble floor?
  - ayx 3y ago
    Marble flooring in homes is quite common in India.
    - sparrowInHand 3y ago
      Its very common in loads of countrys - or at least terra-cotta tiles: Spain, Mexico, Italy, Greece. Its a good way to keep a house cool in summer.
      - permo-w 3y ago
        terracotta tiles is a different matter from marble
        sparrowInHand 3y ago
        Why? It occurs naturally in italy and some other country. Its just a material. One that is easily damaged by accidic cleaners, so not the luxery it sounds. Marble ground down is even in toothpaste..
arcastroe 3y ago
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.
Lammy 3y ago
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 :)
bilekas 3y ago
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!
- type0 3y ago
  > reseat the solder and it was working fine for a few months after but obviously none of these are long term solutions This is why I want to eventually get MiniWare MHP30M Mini Hot Plate
pkolaczk 3y ago
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 relative humidity of the air you start with and the temperature delta. In dry areas this may be ok, but really don't try that method in tropics (or even in Europe in Summer - I can see condensation happening almost all the time in my fridge).
- looping8 3y ago
  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.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  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).
dang 3y ago
Related: Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274907 - April 2010 (38 comments)
deleted 3y ago
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p2hari 3y ago
I have done this with my mac. I believe the 2010 model. Used to get hot very quickly and had to cool it down. :)
umarniz 3y ago
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 console died eventually of water damage.
- als0 3y ago
  > till the console died eventually of water damage. That's so sad!
- bArray 3y ago
  Even with a hot ambient temperature, you can still keep your devices at a safe temperature by increasing air flow with large external fans. You need larger air flow because you'll saturate the air quicker, and you have less thermal run-off (close to max temperatures).
- rokizero 3y ago
  When I was a kid I had an laptop that would overheat when playing age of empires. So I had a bicycle pump setup under my desk so I could quickly blow in some air every 3-4 minutes... If I was to late or forgot the whole thing would just die and all game progress was lost. I remember laughing at the whole situation whenever I had to pump in air. At some point I bought one of those laptop stand with built-in fans. Thanks for reminding me of those good old days :-)
  - jonathanlydall 3y ago
    I love this story. As an adult the thought of stopping every few minutes to manually cool your computer is insufferable, I would rather just not play on that laptop. But yeah, as a kid, I could see myself perhaps having done this.
- bonton89 3y ago
  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.
sfmike 3y ago
i would do this with cell phone batteries constantly like Note 1 back in the day. Back when I'd carry an extra battery because they were swappable and was an easy way to get a 80% ish charge on the go without what was then a poor quality power bank.
Scoundreller 3y ago
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.
DonHopkins 3y ago
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.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I often make the bottom of my laptop slightly wet so it can evaporate and cool it. My parents think it’s a bad idea but I think if I don’t get it inside the laptop it should be fine?
sergioisidoro 3y ago
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
gorbachev 3y ago
I have done this. My work laptop is prone to overheating under heavy workloads, and the fastest way to get it back to operating temperature is to stick in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes. Works every time.
zoltrix303 3y ago
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!
sniglom 3y ago
I remember back when Macbooks had issues with their temperature sensor. They would die due to the sensor cable being too short and everything expanding when the laptop got hot. Apple later resolved this with a firmware update. Anyway, I got asked if I could fix a Macbook that was turning itself off. Sure, that's probably just performing the firmware update. But when I got the Macbook, it turned off just moments after starting OSX. I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes and tried booting it again, yup, this time it took longer before it would turn itself off. I put it back in the freezer for a few hours. Booted it, started the firmware update, praying that it wouldn't turn itself off. Everything went successful and after that the laptop worked perfectly!
dmos62 3y ago
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.
- dacryn 3y ago
  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.
  - dansalvato 3y ago
    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.
- WildGreenLeave 3y ago
  This has to be the Air, because that one is passively cooled. I also use it and in the hot summer I've got 2 fans. One to cool me down, and one to cool my laptop down. Still love the thing, so small, light and convenient while traveling. The few days it is hot here I can run another fan :-)
- ibash 3y ago
  oh! Something to test against this issue: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-m2-flickering-ghosting-with-external-display-merged.2271670/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-m2-flickering-ghosti...
madrobot 3y ago
i once repaired a macbook pro, around 2011, which didnt boot anymore with a towel, blocking the vents and constantly powering it on until, it overheated. it must have been enough to bridge a broken solder point. Took 5 Mintues. Worked for some hours to get the important client data and project files off of it. the idea came to me after the ibook gpu problems which i repaired with a manipulated tealight (3 flames) placing on the gpu, having the ibook upside down, and also turning it on all the time (it directly went off) until it worked for ever. i was a broke student at that time and loved McGyver growing up when i was a kid.
- dacryn 3y ago
  yeah those had bad solder joints with the GPU. I assume it had a discrete gpu in it, which caused issues with stability. I fixed mine by putting the gpu in the oven for a few hours. Continued to work for a few months. Then i did it again, and it worked again for a few weeks. Couldnt fix it a third time though
just-tom 3y ago
My laptop was once heated inside it's case, it was hard to touch it. I don't know how it didn't explode, it was so hot I decided to put it in THE FREEZER. I thought I'd leave it there for 5-6 minutes, but I fell asleep and forgot it THE ENTIRE NIGHT. 7-8 hours. In the morning I panicked as I remembered what I have done. It then had a black screen for a few minutes and I thought I was drowning in my stupidity, but later it worked like a charm. Conclusion - laptops are fine in the freezer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lelima 3y ago
  I dont understand how come condensation while de-freezing didn't damaged the components, but if you spill a bit of water in the keybord might damage the laptop, what brand was that laptop?
  - just-tom 3y ago
    It was HP if I'm not mistaking.
redbell 3y ago
I find it hilarious that I still use the fridge to cool my iPhone in 2023. I find it nostalgic to hear the word PowerBook in a time where you only hear MacBook
praveen4463 3y ago
Wow, didn't know I could do that :) Perhaps a compact desk fridge would be the best to save the kitchen roundtrips.
hakonhaki 3y ago
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.
RugnirViking 3y ago
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.
- jensgk 3y ago
  Leverpostej FTW :-)
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Liver pâté that is in English apparently. I recognised it as leverpastei in Dutch :)
  - olifante 3y ago
    Leverpostej is the most disgusting thing in Danish cuisine. Just the smell of it heating up in the oven gives me nausea, while Danes start drooling in anticipation.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  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 :)
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    That's a really fun idea. I always loved the concept of circular systems, terrariums and the like. I'd love to try and do the calculations to get oxygen-neutral with the plants in my house vs my own exhaled breath, or treat and reuse water on a local level.
rbanffy 3y ago
Been there, done that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA
KineticLensman 3y ago
I worked at a place (early '90s) where the server room was full of (some sort of) Sun machines and a legacy Symbolics Lisp machine. One day the server room's aircon failed and the Sun machines started to die for no obvious reason. The Symbolics was the only thing with a thermometer and its console error messages (complaining about the heat) were the clue that revealed what was going on. Although it was the size of a fridge itself.
Trias11 3y ago
The problem is getting laptop out of a fridge. Everything immediately gets covered by humidity. Easy to brick electronics.
p2detar 3y ago
Had a Quantum Fireball hard drive as a kid. I was playing HoMM2 one day, saved a game and try to reload only to find out the my save file was nowhere to be found. It all went downhill from there: Files reported saved, but no longer there after reboot, other data inconsistencies. Norton Utilities for DOS didn't do anything to help and at the end my PC did not boot anymore. It seemed like a problem with the spindles or the head. I wasn't quite sure as a kid. Desperate, I tried the only other option I could think of - dismounted the hdd and dropped it from several inches high. To my astonishment that did work and by repeating that procedure now and then, I was able to squeeze at least a month or two out of my Quantum before it finally gave up.
aketchum 3y ago
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.
edude03 3y ago
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!
user3939382 3y ago
On Mac you can use this https://ports.macports.org/port/cputhrottle/details/ https://ports.macports.org/port/cputhrottle/details/ http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html
datavirtue 3y ago
I have seen articles claiming you can retorque the screws that hold on the cover plate.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
One day I'm going to connect my water heater inlet to a water cooling block or two and schedule the workloads to queue until somebody takes a shower.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  Perhaps a flow sensor rigged up to trigger processes avoids the need to schedule. (How? Don't ask me)
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Yeah that was the plan. I was using "schedule" in a bit looser sense. My thought was that a Raspberry pi notices the flow and triggers an Apache airflow dataset every 10 sec or so while it's still flowing. DAGs which consume that "dataset" (a misnomer in this case) will run. Flow stops, DAGs stop.
FFP999 3y ago
I did this once with a client's machine at the rinky-dink data center I used to work at. The breakroom fridge kept his server going long enough for us to get his data off.
tput_bel 3y ago
Ooh I have a related story. My brother dropped his phone and cracked his screen and damaged some internal components as well. Sometimes the screen just wouldn't turn on, but the touchscreen would work. I told him to get a new one and he said no, this one is fine, he just has to throw it in the freezer for about 2 minutes at the start of each day. After a few minutes of freezing, the screen actually turned on. I thought it would eventually warm up and need refreezing again, but sure enough, it stayed on for the whole day. I guess there is some circuit that determines if the screen comes on or not, but if it's already on, it won't switch it off, so he just disabled auto-lock and avoided the lock button all day. My next question was how he figured it out. He lives in a cold climate area and his phone screen would consistently work whenever he walked to the store, and consistently not work when he was at home. Eventually he realized it was the temperature that made it work. I've seen stuff about computers in the freezer, etc, but there's something funnier about needing a quick freeze and it's good until you lock it again.
m0rissette 3y ago
Adam? Why don’t you have ketchup in your fridge like a human being? Are you a cyborg?
sonicanatidae 3y ago
The best one I ever saw was someone took a few gallons of 3M non-conductive liquid, put a working 486 motherboard in the bucket, put the bucket in the freezer, then overclocked it until it burned up. They got an impressive overclock out of it, for a few seconds. lol
RajT88 3y ago
The freezer also works if you need to power on a cell phone without associating it with a cell tower. (Why would I do this? I found a cellphone and needed to break into it to figure out whose it was. If the guy had a new phone under the same IMEI, it would have knocked him off the network. Eventually, I found out when I finally busted into it and tracked down his identity, he had since enlisted in the Marines and there wasn't anything he probably was missing on that phone anyways)
xe4l 3y ago
Several friends of mine and I were known to leave our laptops running Gentoo in the freezer with the power cords in for really large software builds many many years ago.
bluepoint 3y ago
I had a laptop which had a faulty memory module, it was working quite well after I put it in the fridge for some reason. Also linux at the time would have kernel panics while freebsd would have some application crashes, but would keep running.
mikhailfranco 3y ago
... because the fridge (and the microwave) are the best pseudo-Faraday cages available to shield EM radiation in most domestic situations - and the microwave it tooo scary for a laptop. ... because the fridge is the last place most burglars look [citation needed].

337 points by vikrum 3y ago

itsthecourier 3y ago

Why does this happen?

prettyStandard 3y ago
Maybe metal contracts at lower temperatures and thus the drive head is able to move with less friction. I will be trying this if I ever experience it. I don't have computer hardware fail that often.
1970-01-01 3y ago
Shrinkage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height
KennyBlanken 3y ago
It doesn't; the whole thing is an urban legend. Goes like this: Try copying files, fails. Try copying files, fails. Try copying files, fails. Put laptop / drive in fridge. Try copying files, fails. Works. "Hey, putting it in the fridge worked!" Nope..it worked because they kept trying. People who comment on things like components shrinking don't understand how hard drives work.
- salawat 3y ago
  Someone needs to brush up on their material science.

orbisvicis 3y ago

Hrrm. I've had a similar experience but with opposite outcome. Edit: There's also the trick about reseating chips by warming the motherboard in the oven, or something along those lines. Never could get my parents to let me try that one out.

tguvot 3y ago

my wife had lg g4 that develop overheat boot problem: by the time it booted it was overheated enough to reboot itself. in order to get everything off the phone i froze it in freezer. it gave me enough time to boot it and copy everything via usb

davesmylie 3y ago

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 end of the heat spectrum, there's baking a motherboard to reflow the solder: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6dygub/baked_motherboard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/6dygu...

doubled112 3y ago
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.
- kwertzzz 3y ago
  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.
  - opan 3y ago
    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.
tiffanyg 3y ago

dougmwne 3y ago

Back in the day, our IT guy in his 70’s pulled this trick on someone’s hard drive to recover a critical last minute presentation. The story became a staple of office parties. See you on the other side John.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

overgard 3y ago

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

RajT88 3y ago
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.

tehlike 3y ago

When i needed to cool down a laptop, i used gel ice packs.

fifilura 3y ago
Me too! Intel MacBook Pro combined with Microsoft teams meetings does this all the time for me. I have a gel ice pack in the frezer. When I put it under the laptop it cools down very quickly and I can work again.

wisemang 3y ago

I 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.)

spcebar 3y ago

I 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.

Zetaphor 3y ago

Small 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.

LocalPCGuy 3y ago
Smaller world, I also used to work with him. And just recently used the fridge trick on an old dying hard drive (it worked fwiw), but don't remember if he was the source of why I thought that might work.
- r-s 3y ago
  Smaller smaller world - I work with him today!

jonhohle 3y ago

If I could go back in time and tell the author about rsync, this delightful post wouldn’t exist.

aaron695 3y ago

The 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.

birdyrooster 3y ago

I used to overclock my Dell Inspiron 9100 laptop and putting it into a mini fridge helped keep the Prescott P4 running cool for benchmarks.

haolez 3y ago

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 a "normal" Linux distro. (I don't think this kind of big performance difference holds up on modern machines though).

eru 3y ago
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?
- pjerem 3y ago
  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 :)
- haolez 3y ago
  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.
  - eru 3y ago
    That makes sense. It's just that for recent distributions, if you have a reasonably common and modern CPU, you already get most of the optimizations you need in the pre-compiled packages.
Scene_Cast2 3y ago
Did condensation not pose a problem? Not just immediate shorts, but perhaps corrosion and the laptop dying earlier than expected.

widea 3y ago

Tried that a long long time ago with a failed harddisk, worked.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

naet 3y ago

When my laptop was getting extremely overheated during certain intensive computation (not necessary having drive issues) I used to grab a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, put an extra ziplock around it to prevent moisture, and pop it under my computer. Worked like a charm to bring the temp down and get through the crunch.

quickthrower2 3y ago

What is the optimum temp? Maybe 4 degrees to avoid any moisture turning to ice. Or lower if you can really dry it out?

Brajeshwar 3y ago

Recover fail Hard Drives after keeping it in the Fridge. Ice packs on top of the routers. I thought these were common practices all along. :-)

the_third_wave 3y ago

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 I installed a surge protector in front of the fuse box. - HP DV6000 motherboard, it worked for a number of years after that and probably still does, the LCD display eventually died which was the end for that piece of plasticky garbage Notice a trend? HP seems to have had problems during the introduction of the RoHS directive [1]. - Asus something-or-other laptop motherboard, still works, one of the SoDIMMs died which left it with only 2 GB and it got retired - PSU board for a 24" Hyundai monitor, still works and is hooked up as second monitor to the... - Apple "Late 2009 27" iMac" graphics card, still works after the first bake, I'm using that machine (running Debian) as my main workstation. The oven and the BGA reworkstation have saved a lot of equipment from early retirement, both at places I worked as well as here. I just repaired the PSU board for a HP (again HP...) 2910ag switch even though I could have swapped it on warranty because replacing a transistor and resistor is much quicker than going through the motions of a warranty replacement and to be honest also just because I can and to be even more honest because I only found out about the 100 year warranty on these switches after I had already fixed it... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...

opan 3y ago
>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 https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-pvm-8044q

kapitanjakc 3y ago

I did this for my cellphone, it got too hot to hold sometimes even when it was idle. Ironically it was from a company called "Lava" so ...

Uptrenda 3y ago

I think this is genius tbh. If you're faced with the prospect of losing important data and feeling silly for trying something so unorthodox I know which one I'd prefer. I've also seen videos on YouTube where repair technicians are able to temporarily fix broken (clicking) hard drives by giving them a good flick with their finger. It seems like magic to me. I've had a hard drive fail recently and I wish I knew about these methods. I wonder if there's any other hacks that might work for saving failing drives?

PeterStuer 3y ago

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 seamlessly switch to a better computer. Now the powerbrick for the laptop from hell was also huge and heavy (I remember the total package was over 4.5 kg, and the battery lasted 80 minutes when new, so you always needed wallpower), but it had the exact with and lenght of the exteral drive cage. So fancy me had the great idea that when I tidied up my desk putting the drive on top of the powerbrick, ofc neatly allingned with the desk edges, looked perfect. Perfect until the drive crashed hard due to being right on top of the very hot powerbrick. All code was checked into subversion, but the 127 pages of a product manual I had been writing the last week were gone without backup. Having come across the freezer method, I decided to give it a try. Nicely sealed in a ziplock freezer bag, I left the drive in overnight. Tried booting it up the next morning without success. Put it back in the freezer on a whim, but had to start writing the manual anew and forgot a out the drive. I came across the drive again while fetching some peas from the freezer a few weeks later. Gave it another try, and lo and behold, it worked! Learned my lesson about excess heat on drives and no nightly backups though, so never needed this procedure again.

engineer_22 3y ago
This kind of experience is hard to replicate therefore hard to learn without the suggestion, thanks for sharing
fredrikholm 3y ago
> 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?
- q87b 3y ago
  > I came across the drive again while fetching some peas from the freezer a few weeks later. Gave it another try, and lo and behold, it worked!

mugivarra69 3y ago

either it was running buldozer cpu or intel's recent power reactor cpus

helb 3y ago

Did that with an old Thinkpad (X32 iirc) years ago. I use Gentoo and some packages (like gcc) could only be compiled during winter months or in a fridge. Also sucessfully rescued some old NVidia card with baking oven around that time…

timetraveller26 3y ago

I was expecting KDE compiling on Gentoo

tforcram 3y ago

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 probably close to 40 degrees F outside. So I hooked up a wired keyboard and mouse, and then plopped the laptop outside on the deck and closed the door with only the keyboard and mouse inside. There was a window which I could see the screen through and start the install. Sure enough with the natural winter cooling the install completed and I was able to use the laptop for a few more years.

notfed 3y ago
Hilarious imagery!!! Thanks for sharing.
aizyuval 3y ago
Download with some help from god. Haha
bonton89 3y ago
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.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  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.

chrismorgan 3y ago

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.)

permo-w 3y ago
where were you working that had a marble floor?
- ayx 3y ago
  Marble flooring in homes is quite common in India.
  - sparrowInHand 3y ago
    Its very common in loads of countrys - or at least terra-cotta tiles: Spain, Mexico, Italy, Greece. Its a good way to keep a house cool in summer.
    - permo-w 3y ago
      terracotta tiles is a different matter from marble
      - sparrowInHand 3y ago
        Why? It occurs naturally in italy and some other country. Its just a material. One that is easily damaged by accidic cleaners, so not the luxery it sounds. Marble ground down is even in toothpaste..

arcastroe 3y ago

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.

Lammy 3y ago

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 :)

bilekas 3y ago

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!

type0 3y ago
> reseat the solder and it was working fine for a few months after but obviously none of these are long term solutions This is why I want to eventually get MiniWare MHP30M Mini Hot Plate

pkolaczk 3y ago

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 relative humidity of the air you start with and the temperature delta. In dry areas this may be ok, but really don't try that method in tropics (or even in Europe in Summer - I can see condensation happening almost all the time in my fridge).

looping8 3y ago
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.
mnw21cam 3y ago
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).

dang 3y ago

Related: Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274907 - April 2010 (38 comments)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

p2hari 3y ago

I have done this with my mac. I believe the 2010 model. Used to get hot very quickly and had to cool it down. :)

umarniz 3y ago

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 console died eventually of water damage.

als0 3y ago
> till the console died eventually of water damage. That's so sad!
bArray 3y ago
Even with a hot ambient temperature, you can still keep your devices at a safe temperature by increasing air flow with large external fans. You need larger air flow because you'll saturate the air quicker, and you have less thermal run-off (close to max temperatures).
rokizero 3y ago
When I was a kid I had an laptop that would overheat when playing age of empires. So I had a bicycle pump setup under my desk so I could quickly blow in some air every 3-4 minutes... If I was to late or forgot the whole thing would just die and all game progress was lost. I remember laughing at the whole situation whenever I had to pump in air. At some point I bought one of those laptop stand with built-in fans. Thanks for reminding me of those good old days :-)
- jonathanlydall 3y ago
  I love this story. As an adult the thought of stopping every few minutes to manually cool your computer is insufferable, I would rather just not play on that laptop. But yeah, as a kid, I could see myself perhaps having done this.
bonton89 3y ago
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.

sfmike 3y ago

i would do this with cell phone batteries constantly like Note 1 back in the day. Back when I'd carry an extra battery because they were swappable and was an easy way to get a 80% ish charge on the go without what was then a poor quality power bank.

Scoundreller 3y ago

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.

DonHopkins 3y ago

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.

circuit10 3y ago
I often make the bottom of my laptop slightly wet so it can evaporate and cool it. My parents think it’s a bad idea but I think if I don’t get it inside the laptop it should be fine?

sergioisidoro 3y ago

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

gorbachev 3y ago

I have done this. My work laptop is prone to overheating under heavy workloads, and the fastest way to get it back to operating temperature is to stick in the fridge or freezer for a few minutes. Works every time.

zoltrix303 3y ago

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!

sniglom 3y ago

I remember back when Macbooks had issues with their temperature sensor. They would die due to the sensor cable being too short and everything expanding when the laptop got hot. Apple later resolved this with a firmware update. Anyway, I got asked if I could fix a Macbook that was turning itself off. Sure, that's probably just performing the firmware update. But when I got the Macbook, it turned off just moments after starting OSX. I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes and tried booting it again, yup, this time it took longer before it would turn itself off. I put it back in the freezer for a few hours. Booted it, started the firmware update, praying that it wouldn't turn itself off. Everything went successful and after that the laptop worked perfectly!

dmos62 3y ago

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.

dacryn 3y ago
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.
- dansalvato 3y ago
  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.
WildGreenLeave 3y ago
This has to be the Air, because that one is passively cooled. I also use it and in the hot summer I've got 2 fans. One to cool me down, and one to cool my laptop down. Still love the thing, so small, light and convenient while traveling. The few days it is hot here I can run another fan :-)
ibash 3y ago
oh! Something to test against this issue: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-m2-flickering-ghosting-with-external-display-merged.2271670/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-m2-flickering-ghosti...

madrobot 3y ago

i once repaired a macbook pro, around 2011, which didnt boot anymore with a towel, blocking the vents and constantly powering it on until, it overheated. it must have been enough to bridge a broken solder point. Took 5 Mintues. Worked for some hours to get the important client data and project files off of it. the idea came to me after the ibook gpu problems which i repaired with a manipulated tealight (3 flames) placing on the gpu, having the ibook upside down, and also turning it on all the time (it directly went off) until it worked for ever. i was a broke student at that time and loved McGyver growing up when i was a kid.

dacryn 3y ago
yeah those had bad solder joints with the GPU. I assume it had a discrete gpu in it, which caused issues with stability. I fixed mine by putting the gpu in the oven for a few hours. Continued to work for a few months. Then i did it again, and it worked again for a few weeks. Couldnt fix it a third time though

just-tom 3y ago

My laptop was once heated inside it's case, it was hard to touch it. I don't know how it didn't explode, it was so hot I decided to put it in THE FREEZER. I thought I'd leave it there for 5-6 minutes, but I fell asleep and forgot it THE ENTIRE NIGHT. 7-8 hours. In the morning I panicked as I remembered what I have done. It then had a black screen for a few minutes and I thought I was drowning in my stupidity, but later it worked like a charm. Conclusion - laptops are fine in the freezer.

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lelima 3y ago
I dont understand how come condensation while de-freezing didn't damaged the components, but if you spill a bit of water in the keybord might damage the laptop, what brand was that laptop?
- just-tom 3y ago
  It was HP if I'm not mistaking.

redbell 3y ago

I find it hilarious that I still use the fridge to cool my iPhone in 2023. I find it nostalgic to hear the word PowerBook in a time where you only hear MacBook

praveen4463 3y ago

Wow, didn't know I could do that :) Perhaps a compact desk fridge would be the best to save the kitchen roundtrips.

hakonhaki 3y ago

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.

RugnirViking 3y ago

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.

jensgk 3y ago
Leverpostej FTW :-)
- Aachen 3y ago
  Liver pâté that is in English apparently. I recognised it as leverpastei in Dutch :)
- olifante 3y ago
  Leverpostej is the most disgusting thing in Danish cuisine. Just the smell of it heating up in the oven gives me nausea, while Danes start drooling in anticipation.
bloopernova 3y ago
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 :)
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  That's a really fun idea. I always loved the concept of circular systems, terrariums and the like. I'd love to try and do the calculations to get oxygen-neutral with the plants in my house vs my own exhaled breath, or treat and reuse water on a local level.

rbanffy 3y ago

Been there, done that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA

KineticLensman 3y ago

I worked at a place (early '90s) where the server room was full of (some sort of) Sun machines and a legacy Symbolics Lisp machine. One day the server room's aircon failed and the Sun machines started to die for no obvious reason. The Symbolics was the only thing with a thermometer and its console error messages (complaining about the heat) were the clue that revealed what was going on. Although it was the size of a fridge itself.

Trias11 3y ago

The problem is getting laptop out of a fridge. Everything immediately gets covered by humidity. Easy to brick electronics.

p2detar 3y ago

Had a Quantum Fireball hard drive as a kid. I was playing HoMM2 one day, saved a game and try to reload only to find out the my save file was nowhere to be found. It all went downhill from there: Files reported saved, but no longer there after reboot, other data inconsistencies. Norton Utilities for DOS didn't do anything to help and at the end my PC did not boot anymore. It seemed like a problem with the spindles or the head. I wasn't quite sure as a kid. Desperate, I tried the only other option I could think of - dismounted the hdd and dropped it from several inches high. To my astonishment that did work and by repeating that procedure now and then, I was able to squeeze at least a month or two out of my Quantum before it finally gave up.

aketchum 3y ago

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.

edude03 3y ago

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!

user3939382 3y ago

On Mac you can use this https://ports.macports.org/port/cputhrottle/details/ https://ports.macports.org/port/cputhrottle/details/ http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html

datavirtue 3y ago

I have seen articles claiming you can retorque the screws that hold on the cover plate.

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__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

One day I'm going to connect my water heater inlet to a water cooling block or two and schedule the workloads to queue until somebody takes a shower.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
Perhaps a flow sensor rigged up to trigger processes avoids the need to schedule. (How? Don't ask me)
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Yeah that was the plan. I was using "schedule" in a bit looser sense. My thought was that a Raspberry pi notices the flow and triggers an Apache airflow dataset every 10 sec or so while it's still flowing. DAGs which consume that "dataset" (a misnomer in this case) will run. Flow stops, DAGs stop.

FFP999 3y ago

I did this once with a client's machine at the rinky-dink data center I used to work at. The breakroom fridge kept his server going long enough for us to get his data off.

tput_bel 3y ago

Ooh I have a related story. My brother dropped his phone and cracked his screen and damaged some internal components as well. Sometimes the screen just wouldn't turn on, but the touchscreen would work. I told him to get a new one and he said no, this one is fine, he just has to throw it in the freezer for about 2 minutes at the start of each day. After a few minutes of freezing, the screen actually turned on. I thought it would eventually warm up and need refreezing again, but sure enough, it stayed on for the whole day. I guess there is some circuit that determines if the screen comes on or not, but if it's already on, it won't switch it off, so he just disabled auto-lock and avoided the lock button all day. My next question was how he figured it out. He lives in a cold climate area and his phone screen would consistently work whenever he walked to the store, and consistently not work when he was at home. Eventually he realized it was the temperature that made it work. I've seen stuff about computers in the freezer, etc, but there's something funnier about needing a quick freeze and it's good until you lock it again.

m0rissette 3y ago

Adam? Why don’t you have ketchup in your fridge like a human being? Are you a cyborg?

sonicanatidae 3y ago

The best one I ever saw was someone took a few gallons of 3M non-conductive liquid, put a working 486 motherboard in the bucket, put the bucket in the freezer, then overclocked it until it burned up. They got an impressive overclock out of it, for a few seconds. lol

RajT88 3y ago

The freezer also works if you need to power on a cell phone without associating it with a cell tower. (Why would I do this? I found a cellphone and needed to break into it to figure out whose it was. If the guy had a new phone under the same IMEI, it would have knocked him off the network. Eventually, I found out when I finally busted into it and tracked down his identity, he had since enlisted in the Marines and there wasn't anything he probably was missing on that phone anyways)

xe4l 3y ago

Several friends of mine and I were known to leave our laptops running Gentoo in the freezer with the power cords in for really large software builds many many years ago.

bluepoint 3y ago

I had a laptop which had a faulty memory module, it was working quite well after I put it in the fridge for some reason. Also linux at the time would have kernel panics while freebsd would have some application crashes, but would keep running.

mikhailfranco 3y ago

... because the fridge (and the microwave) are the best pseudo-Faraday cages available to shield EM radiation in most domestic situations - and the microwave it tooo scary for a laptop. ... because the fridge is the last place most burglars look [citation needed].