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Comment by djmips | Hacker News Reader

When I worked my first job in retail in the mid eighties - we were selling Atari ST and there was an official Atari bulletin to do exactly that. It would reseat the socketed chips.

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interesting; i doubt my memory is that faulty, so it's possible the story went through some iterations, making it an apocryphal story about apple, instead. Or, possibly, the major pick and place manufacturer had a slew of alignment issues in the 80s!

I thought the apple "lift and drop the computer" story was about the Apple 3. It had no vents, so it was always overheating and "unseating chips" like the Xbox 360 heat issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws

And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they cooked themselves even more, or they put the mobo in the oven on a low temperature. That fix was also 100% used for fixing certain graphics cards unseating in the mid 2000s as well.

I've got an HP Laser Printer from about 15 years or so. About once a year, the printer stops responding and I have to remove the board, put it in the oven for 10 minutes or so to revive it.

What even is the theory on how that could possibly work? I believe you, it's just that I don't have any mental model of how baking a circuit board makes it work right for a year, and how it keeps working to fix the issue.

The theory is that 'baking" it could reflow a bad solder joint and fix it. A popular fix of last resort.

I get that that could work and might solve the problem entirely. What I don't get is why you'd ever have to do that every few months.

Laser printers have parts that can get very hot. If their "baking" reflowed the parts, but just barely, maybe those hot parts would just cause the exact same problem all over again.

Ah! There we go! That was what I was missing. Thanks. It all makes sense now.

I've reflowed a GPU in an oven before, personally. with 5 little balls of aluminum foil as standoffs and monitoring the temp closely. It fixed it. I probably still have that - working - card somewhere.

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