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

This reminds me of a time I tried to install Ubuntu on an old thick Dell laptop many years ago.<p>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.<p>It was winter at the time, I can&#x27;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.<p>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 <i>terrible</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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<p>Of course this wasn’t very good for electronic devices and hence every console I bought died with a year of over heating.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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 <i>expect</i> 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 <i>editing</i> overnight when it was somewhat cooler.)

Never seen this done to a whole laptop, but it wasn&#x27;t an uncommon last ditch method for pulling files off a dying HDD back in the days of spinning platters.<p>Preferably in a zip lock vacuum bag and left over night.<p>This is a 17 year old article, but I&#x27;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.<p>On the other end of the heat spectrum, there&#x27;s baking a motherboard to reflow the solder: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;talesfromtechsupport&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6dygub&#x2F;baked_motherboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;talesfromtechsupport&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6dygu...</a>

My laptop was once heated inside it&#x27;s case, it was hard to touch it. I don&#x27;t know how it didn&#x27;t explode, it was so hot I decided to put it in THE FREEZER. I thought I&#x27;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.<p>If you&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>I guess there is some circuit that determines if the screen comes on or not, but if it&#x27;s already on, it won&#x27;t switch it off, so he just disabled auto-lock and avoided the lock button all day.<p>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&#x27;ve seen stuff about computers in the freezer, etc, but there&#x27;s something funnier about needing a quick freeze and it&#x27;s good until you lock it again.

I&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;normal&quot; Linux distro. (I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve baked which worked:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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<p>Notice a trend? HP seems to have had problems during the introduction of the RoHS directive [1].<p>- Asus something-or-other laptop motherboard, still works, one of the SoDIMMs died which left it with only 2 GB and it got retired<p>- PSU board for a 24&quot; Hyundai monitor, still works and is hooked up as second monitor to the...<p>- Apple &quot;Late 2009 27&quot; iMac&quot; graphics card, still works after the first bake, I&#x27;m using that machine (running Debian) as my main workstation.<p>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...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...</a>

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.<p>Anyway, I got asked if I could fix a Macbook that was turning itself off. Sure, that&#x27;s probably just performing the firmware update. But when I got the Macbook, it turned off just moments after starting OSX.<p>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&#x27;t turn itself off. Everything went successful and after that the laptop worked perfectly!

I used to do this on the 2019? 16&quot; Intel MacBook Pro when doing heavy rust&#x2F;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 &#x27;90s) where the server room was full of (some sort of) Sun machines and a legacy Symbolics Lisp machine. One day the server room&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>It actually worked after but it was pure luck I think.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;never sleep.<p>If I needed to shut down I’d need to repeat this overheating process again.<p>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 &quot;trapping the cold&quot; 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&#x27;t exactly reliable in an emergency situation.

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.<p>(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.)

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 :)

Had a Quantum Fireball hard drive as a kid.<p>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&#x27;t do anything to help and at the end my PC did not boot anymore.<p>It seemed like a problem with the spindles or the head. I wasn&#x27;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.

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!

Hrrm. I&#x27;ve had a similar experience but with opposite outcome.<p><i>Edit</i>: There&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.<p>i was a broke student at that time and loved McGyver growing up when i was a kid.

Related:<p><i>Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1274907">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1274907</a> - April 2010 (38 comments)

I think this is genius tbh. If you&#x27;re faced with the prospect of losing important data and feeling silly for trying something so unorthodox I know which one I&#x27;d prefer. I&#x27;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&#x27;ve had a hard drive fail recently and I wish I knew about these methods. I wonder if there&#x27;s any other hacks that might work for saving failing drives?

The freezer also works if you need to power on a cell phone without associating it with a cell tower.<p>(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&#x27;t anything he probably was missing on that phone anyways)

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.

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

On Mac you can use this<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ports.macports.org&#x2F;port&#x2F;cputhrottle&#x2F;details&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ports.macports.org&#x2F;port&#x2F;cputhrottle&#x2F;details&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.willnolan.com&#x2F;cputhrottle&#x2F;cputhrottle.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.willnolan.com&#x2F;cputhrottle&#x2F;cputhrottle.html</a>

Meanwhile, on an older macbook air (still with SSD, so I thought no problem, the fan won&#x27;t need to engage for a while anyway), I didn&#x27;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 <i>not</i> happy with me at all.<p>Had to wait for it to warm up closer to ambient to function normally.

Same happened to me with a phone. (nexus 5x). It stopped working all the sudden during a vacation.<p>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.<p>As soon as the phone was out of the freezer it would die in about 30 seconds.<p>Saved all the vacation pictures this way

... 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.<p>... because the fridge is the last place most burglars look [citation needed].

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.

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.<p>They got an impressive overclock out of it, for a few seconds. lol

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.

i would do this with cell phone batteries constantly like Note 1 back in the day.<p>Back when I&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t quite remember) and it uh was not in good shape. Dumb things you do in college

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.

I did this once with a client&#x27;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.

One day I&#x27;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.

Been there, done that. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=99Sk2ZnjGQA</a>

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

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.

I did this for my cellphone, it got too hot to hold sometimes even when it was idle.<p>Ironically it was from a company called &quot;Lava&quot; so ...

Wow, didn&#x27;t know I could do that :) Perhaps a compact desk fridge would be the best to save the kitchen roundtrips.

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

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

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

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

I was expecting KDE compiling on Gentoo

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

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

my wife had lg g4 that develop overheat boot problem: by the time it booted it was overheated enough to reboot itself.<p>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

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

Why does this happen?

either it was running buldozer cpu or intel&#x27;s recent power reactor cpus

The reliability of computer parts is quite remarkable compared to the past.<p>I&#x27;d expect this to be a less useful trick these days. Not sure.