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.

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.

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.

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.)

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/6dygu...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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_Subst...

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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!

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

Pro tip: Install the cables on the drive before putting it in the freezer inside the ziplock bag. Close the bag with duct tape or something to stop air getting in. Then when you take it out to use it, keep the drive in the bag and just plug in the cables. Keeping the frozen drive in the bag will prevent the instant condensation the moment you remove it from the freezer.

Double pro tip (I've done this): Forget the freezer. Put the drive a bag, with cables hanging out. Then immerse the drive/bag in a bucket of ice water. That keeps it cool even while being used. Just be careful to keep the cables away from the water. Last time I did this I used a garbage bag large enough that I didn't need to seal anything.

> 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.

> 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?

This kind of experience is hard to replicate therefore hard to learn without the suggestion, thanks for sharing

Replacing the thermal paste usually helps.

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)

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.

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)?

10 mins does sound a little quick?

I can say from experiencing, 20 mins in the freezer for a bare 3.5 or 2.5 HDD would give about 5 mins of "quick, find important stuff" time...

>_last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD_ Before pulling it apart and and putting the platters in an identical donor drive. (Dam IBM DEATHSTAR drives back in the day!)

One of the fixes for the red ring of death on Xbox 360 was to wrap it in a towel so it would get hot enough to reflow bad solder joints.

As to the fridge point, fridge vs. room temp probably wouldn't make much difference in what I glean of the scenario from a quick glance. It'd help a bit - would cool things a bit faster,* but, eh ... I wouldn't expect that to necessarily be a KEY element.

That written, temperature may still have been quite important (i.e., reboot alone wouldn't help). Particularly with a device containing something like spinning platters (as well as potentially extra heat generation associated with certain failure modes), and the additional factor of laptop heat load trade-offs, ... simply having the laptop off for some minutes might have been essential. In fact, the writer notes that transfer stopped during the first attempt to retrieve the data (after 10 minutes in fridge), hence a second round of 20 minutes was carried out after which the remaining data was retrieved.

The fact that that second pause was 20 minutes AND was carried out in a fridge may have had little to no role in success the second time. To me, that's something like a 50-50 odds event ... particularly with this kind of infrequent (for an individual, hopefully) 'high-terror' n=1 event / 'data'.** It may have primarily been the difference between having transferred other files prior to transferring that (last? not checking that detail) file vs. not.

* Newton said proportional to temperature difference, but that's a rather rough guide in general for this sort of scenario - even with just basic details missing here

** I.e., where most people aren't too interested in carrying out any kind of more detailed post-mortem ... most are much more interested in leaving the terror part behind.

Edit: OTOH, one should not discount the power of belief out-of-hand - i.e., 'externum-placebo' or something to that effect, if you please (my verbum fabulists will know). As a certain purveyor of cheap movie-branded trinkets once said in response to the soft and breathless exclamation of "I don't believe it!": "That ... is why you fail."

(Though I may be mixing up my little Gs from movies ...)

In any case, the fridge may have had more of an effect than my crudely rational analysis above suggests. {In any case}^2, this entirely unnecessary but necessary addendum will conclude with - ha ha, but, also, serious.

When I was ~11ish I found my desktop was overheating quite regularly. The solution I came up with on my $0 dollar budget was to pop the side of the case off and point a box fan into it. Worked like a charm…for a while.

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

Reallyt didn't think it would work. And when it acctually did, I was sure it would only be a temporary solution. Much to my surprise, it's still going strong today (mostly used as an Octoprint server for my 3d printer.)

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.