Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge? | Hacker News Reader

Adam? …is there a reason your laptop is in the fridge?

kempa.com

136 pointssuperberliner38 comments

I would recommend just chilling the drive, and using an external enclosure to read the data. Less risk of killing a whole laptop's worth of electronics with condensation, less warmup time wasted in booting, etc.

He mentioned that the reason he didn't do that was to avoid voiding the warranty.

i'd be shocked if refrigerating it didn't

If it hadn't worked, he may not have posted about it, and then no one would know that it had been in the fridge...

If you manage to get the temperature in your fridge up to 10°C you are good[1].

[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html

  # Operating temperature: 50° to 95° F
  (10° to 35° C)
  # Storage temperature: -13° to 113° F
  (-24° to 45° C)

10C not all that cold for a refrigerator but -24C is hard to reach.

That's pretty easy really. It's usually around 35-40 F, 10C is 50F, so just leaving your door cracked will probably accomplish that.

In fact I suspect the Macbook's own heat would keep it above that while copying the files.

Especially, if you post pictures of the deed to your blog and it shows up on Hacker News! :)

Sorry, I accidentally hit the down arrow on your comment when I meant to hit the "reply" link. :-(

Could someone reverse my mistake? The parent comment does not deserve downmodding.

The difference is here, that you can tell if something has been opened, but it is nearly impossible to tell if something has been 'friged.' Apple can only void your warranty if they can catch you. And please don't mention that he 'posted on the internet' so the Apple store will catch him; we all know the prob of that is zeroish.

So, I think it is safe to say for all intents and purposes refrigerating your computer doesn't void your warranty.

Well, if there's enough condensation, they might catch you. Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones? The ones that permanently change color when they get wet so that they know that the phone got wet?

Don't refrigerators and freezers have lower-than-normal condensation? Put a loaf of bread or cookies in the refrigerator and they will be dry by the end of the day.

Condensation happens when the article is reintroduced to a warm, damp environment -- ask anyone who wears glasses in winter. Photographers will often put cold-soaked bodies and lenses into ziploc bags before going indoors after an outdoor shoot in winter, maintaining the low-humidity environment until the equipment has reached room temperature.

[EDIT: spelling and capitalisation]

> Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones?

No.

I'm not sure about Powerbooks, but even in unibody Macbook Pros, both the HD and RAM are considered user-serviceable without voiding the warranty. There's an entire section of the manual dedicated to swapping them.

The hard drives in aluminum PowerBooks, older MacBook Pros, and virtually every other Apple laptop except the MacBooks and unibody MacBook Pros are not user-serviceable.

They aren't easy to get to: it takes a couple hours and ~50 screws to swap the drive in my 12" Powerbook — but it doesn't violate the warranty to do so.

They probably wouldn't have covered it if you obviously fucked it up while taking it apart, but there was never anti-tamper tape or anything in there to directly detect that you'd done so.

I had a dell where the power connector socket went bad, it would literally smoke if you tried to plug power into it to charge it. I took the hard drive out and shipped it back driveless without any problems. Got a newer model replacement laptop and a free external (well, $15 enclosure) for the inconvenience of using my desktop for a week.

A fridge is typically quite dry and is a good spot to put stuff that needs to dry out (dry-aged meat for example). A unit like he had with an attached freezer uses the air from the freezer to cool the fridge portion and the freezer air is really dry.

My wife's iPod broke last year. The hard disk was clicking and the device just wouldn't boot up. We took it to the genius bar and they helpfully suggested we buy a new iPod. Tough break.

Then somehow we found out about this cool the hard disk technique. We put the iPod in a ziplock bag and in the freezer overnight. The device was working perfectly fine while backing it up, but as per the post, it would warm up and start stalling. So we put it on an ice block and it lasted long enough to get the backup done.

I used to have an old laptop that overheated like crazy, it rested on a 6 pack of soda that had been in the fridge. I had 2 sets of 6 packs so I could rotate them as they warmed up.

Take the six pack, fold it flat:

000

-----

000

Laptop on top :)

This is why you typically leave the hard drive (or in this case, the laptop) in the freezer for atleast a few hours. Doing this allowed me to copy a 60 gig which windows couldn't even mount to work no problem - which took well over a couple hours, all in one shot.

Using this method, the electronics don't need to be kept in your refrigerator or freezer.

Sounds like you had removed the hard drive, which does provide an added cooling advantage this guy felt unable to exploit.

Can anyone explain the theory behind why this works?

My girlfriend is using my ~4 year old Macbook Pro, and it's getting warmer and warmer. It's too hot for direct contact with skin. Also, it's starting to drop the Wifi at high temps. The battery has been replaced once already.

As a result, we're looking at one of those unibody 13" Macbooks, those are reported to be cooler. Temperature is the only reason we're getting rid of this one.

Maybe you just have to clean the fans?

Thanks for the tip.

I had a drive that was clicking and was completely unreadable. I put it in the freezer for 45 min and was able to read the drive for about 10 to recover a few files. Then it died and the trick didn't work again. But when all else fails, try the freezer or fridge!

We used to freeze NES cartridges when blowing stopped working. We always chalked its working up to magic/luck, but perhaps there was more to it.

Is it just the heat or is there something else at play here?

Does taking out your hard drive seriously void your warranty on a Macbook? That sounds, uh... completely insane relative to the practices of every other PC manufacturer.

No, it doesn't. Here's the relevant quote, indicating that the only thing they won't cover is damage you cause while attempting a swap. Swapping itself is fine.

WARNING: Apple recommends that you have an Apple-certified technician install replacement drives and memory. Consult the service and support information that came with your computer for information about how to contact Apple for service. If you attempt to install a replacement drive or memory and damage your equipment, such damage is not covered by the limited warranty on your computer.

2nd this - I always remove hard disks before dropping off laptops for service.

It used to work with bad floppies too, a long time ago. Nowadays I'm using SSDs in all my development and server machines.

I often put my dell D620 in the fridge to cool it down if it overheats and starts running slow.

Damn that's one complicated die.

This is a Latitude defect (in my opinion). The fan gets clogged really easily and really quickly. If you open your laptop and clean the vent it will run correctly. Your CPU will go from 60C down to 35C instantly. I'm predicting a class action lawsuit at some point.

http://vidmar.net/weblog/archive/2008/06/29/my-dell-laptop-i...

Cool.

And if you put your laptop in the oven you can rip a CD faster. Also I've heard that bubble sort finishes faster when in a microwave set to Popcorn.

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