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Putting a MacBook Pro In the Oven To Fix It
An anonymous reader writes: A post at iFixit explains how one user with a failing MacBook Pro fixed it by baking it in the oven. The device had overheating issues for months, reaching temperatures over 100 C. When it finally died, some research suggested the extreme heat caused the logic board to flex and break the solder connections. The solution was to simply reflow the solder, but that's hard to do with a MBP. "Instead, I cracked open the back of my laptop, disconnected all eleven connectors and three heat sinks from the logic board, and turned the oven up to 340 F. I put my $900 part on a cookie sheet and baked it for seven nerve-wracking minutes. After it cooled, I reapplied thermal paste, put it all back together, and cheered when it booted. It ran great for the next eight months." The laptop failed again, and another brief vacation into the oven got it running once more.
I dont think telling people you can fix a mac book by baking it will end well. So perhaps a disclaimer saying NOT to do this would be in order?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There is a joke here, but my dog died, so I'm to depressed to think of one.
Hipster "invents" the reflow oven and blogs about the "invention" in amazement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Is it news because it was a MacBook?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
by putting it in the oven! The microwave is even faster.
Use a fucking heat gun. Don't back your shit. Jesus, what kind of fucking rookies live in this world?
I used to do this to a bunch of HP printer boards at one time and it worked nicely.
This has been a problem for a long time on not just the Macbook Pro, but plenty of other laptops that used a few specific CPU/GPU sockets in their designs along with in-adequate heatsinks/fans for the thermal load. Those sockets should never have been used for those designs due to the temperature points of molten solder on a part that is specifically designed to be mobile (and thus subject to falls, movement, and other torques when the system may still be hot, especially moments after a shutdown or sleep when they are closed up and placed in a bag/backpack and slung over the shoulder).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
inquiring minds want to know...
You obviously haven't figured out how Apple works...
Fixed a MBP's bad nVidia chip using a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and a shield made of aluminum foil. I wouldn't recommend the oven approach unless you're desperate, since many parts are really not meant to go past 100C, much less the ~250C required for proper reflow.
Oh, and whatever you do, be sure to remove any plastic/rubber chips or standoffs first as they will most certainly melt, and reapply thermal paste afterwards (Apple and many OEMs are infamously bad with thermal paste, so this is a good idea whenever you crack open a laptop).
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Back in the 70s if you had one of those old television sets, you could 'fix' the picture once in a while by banging on the outside of the t.v. Kind of worked sometimes but I don't think it was in the manual.
There were some other heat related problems with Mac laptops around that time, as well.
Not that I'm trying to slam Apple. They were actually really good about replacing a board in a 13" PowerPC Macbook Pro I'd purchased with their extended warranty plan some years later after I'd handed the machine down to my room mate. She'd started having problems with the screen going off and took it in to the local Apple store. They checked their computer and said the machine had the extended warranty plan (I'd forgotten I'd even purchased with it) and did the repair for free. We were both ready to write the machine off but she got another couple of years of use out of it. I'm still using a 17" Macbook pro from 2006 on a regular basis, too. it still works great for what it needs to do and nothing I could upgrade it to really seems as nice as that machine is.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I wouldn't put this laptop on my lap after lithium batteries have been abused to such degree.
You can quickly charge your iPhone 6 by putting it in the microwave on high for 3 minutes. Try it, it works great!!!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Is this the problem?
340 degrees fahrenheit isn't hot enough to reflow solder. The best I think that would do would to cause warpage of the board in the other direction. The fact that it failed again later, and then worked for a while after 'baking' it again, supports this.
Would not recommend, if for no other reason than the average person would either wreck something trying to get it apart, or not be able to get it all back together again afterwards.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
that baking the macbook pro would fix it since a microwave can be used to charge an iphone!
iMpressed!
People have been baking graphics cards to fix them for years.
It's a bit more interesting that they're claiming a 10-20 degree C drop in temperatures from drilling a few holes in the case around the fans. It really bugs me that laptop manufacturers seem to make really terrible cooling decisions. One old laptop I had (HP TX2500?) was notorious for heat problems to the point that a large laptop forum had a sticky with a list of things to improve it, ranging from removing the paint from the heatsinks to removing the foamy thermal pad between the GPU and the heatsink and replacing it with something which actually conducted heat. People reported huge temperature drops after doing these things, and I just don't get why companies won't sell something with a few simple, cheap tweaks which don't change the aesthetic but massively improve cooling.
Eutetic solder (the old non-RoHS stuff with lead in it) melts at 361 F, everything else in common use melts at a higher temperature.
Bruce Perens.
I was told the problem is with lead-free solder, that it is brittle and more susceptible to cracking.
One of the desperate fixes for xbox red ring errors was to place it in the oven on a towel.
A heat gun requires you to know where to heat. An oven does not.
Not only will the microwave fixe it but it will charge the battery too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Didn't Microsoft have the same problem with the XBox?
Is it news because it was a MacBook?
Would you be jumping to the conclusion that this was a conspiracy to promote Dell products if this had been a Dell laptop? It's an article about a guy who did something nerdy in his kitchen to fix a broken laptop motherboard... end of story. This may not be news to you but it is to me and a number of other people who don't spend our spare time repairing broken motherboards so stop complaining and go find your tinfoil hat... you need it.
This is like the q-tip trick i used to reflow the BGA on an xbox 360 i snagged for 10 bucks. It got rid of the ring of death, but the unit would still flake out after about 45 minutes. Long enough to trade it to EB Games, so a profitable endeavor for me at least.
This is like stuffing sawdust in a transmission, it's buying a bit of time but not really fixing it.
I did a similar thing with a heat gun and a non-functional PS3. I ran the heat gun over the CPU and it bought me another month of life on the unit. After 3 times of doing this and getting less and less life out of it each time, I purchased a new PS3. To my delight, the new one has been working ever since.
I've done this with Xbox 360s, PS3s, HP DV9000s and various MBPs for money. This "fix" never lasts more than 6 months. The CPU/GPU has been overheating for some time if the machine gets to this point and caused damage. This is not a magic bullet, and I'm not sure why this is "news".
Tried "reflowing" an old IBM Thinkpad with failing GPU socket once.
Tried to be careful and do it right placing aluminum foil around everything that wasn't GPU... used a heat gun and IR thermometer along with ...u... umm... ah... instructions pulled off the.....um... Internet.
End result was a number of surface mount chips on the opposite side of the board had melted off of their pads and dropped clear off ... mainboard basically a total loss.
Trying was better than nothing as computer was not worth cost of repairing and any replacement board you could source on ebay would have come with same defective design/soldering job.
What utter nonsense. Miracle cures are just artifacts of long tail effects.
What socket? The GPUs in question are soldered to the logic board, and it's the shitty lead free balls that ATI/nVidia stuck on their chips that are failing.
But you're right, Apple aren't the only manufacturers that use these chips to have problems, but for some reason they get all the stick for it.
Breaking Bad except it's a desktop administrator and he can't make millions with baking MacBooks either so he dies in the 1st episode.
thank for post
www.niresman.tk
I revived a non-booting MacBook Pro doing this, although I did follow the directions here
http://russell.heistuman.com/2...
and I have a feeling that what really fixed it was re-applying the thermal paste.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
I still do this from time to time, only without the extreme overkill of using an oven.
As the lucky owner of one of these fine computers which were outfitted with overperforming nVidia GPUs, every few months I run into similar problems. While I could go a little over the top in addressing the issue, all I really need to do is turn the thing upside down, remove the bottom cover, loosen the heat sink covering the GPU and then turn the poor thing on and let it run for up to half an hour. Since the GPU runs hot enough to loosen its own solder, it also runs hot enough to put it back.
Eventually entropy will catch up with me and the poor thing will die of some other cause, and I will have to let it go. But until then, a little heat-related abuse can be a good thing.
This was a common trick back with the early Xbox 360 and the Red Ring of Death plague. The version I most frequently heard involved wrapping it in towels as well, to insulate other components from the heat.
Gamers have gone a step further with broken PlayStation and various Xbox'es by completely reballing BGA chips. Though, it is much more tricky, it is not *new* per-se.
A friend of mine at work did the board in the oven trick for his Macbook (I don't know if it was a pro or not), about 3 weeks ago with success. I'm going to tell him about the "speed holes" to see if that works for him also.
Same problem (solder flow). I used the same temperature and duration. The fix lasts about 6 months each time, then I have to tear down the laptop and bake the MB. Has worked every time.
If you find yourself resorting to baking your motherboard in the oven to fix it, this is an act of desperation. Yeah the guy managed to get some more life out of the motherboard but this isn't a fix, this is a temporary hack.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
No lead solder is notorious for causing connection problems on BGA packages. It is the most common hardware failure we see when doing failure analysis on returned PCBs. A re-flow operation will almost always fix the problem but you need expensive equipment to do it properly. The proper thermal profile is essential during this process as well as the proper flux
The failure can be caused by the PCB vibrating or flexing which will crack the solder ball causing a bad connection. Lead based solder does not exhibit this problem. I have been told they still use lead in the Aerospace industry. Service calls on satellites is rather expensive..
Try baking him in the oven for 7 minutes at 340 F.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/... It's a problem for 10s of 1000s of MacBook Pro users who purchased in 2011
which again proves that apple is shit. To all you fanboys who think its the best thing since sliced bread, you're a complete idiot. But you must like paying out your ass for proprietary hardware.
I was actually a little worried about this and tried a hair dryer on high heat for about 10 minutes over the GPU. It also worked like a charm. Make sure to let it cool down for at least 15-20 minutes after doing this. The one advantage of doing it this way over the oven is that you dont have to completely remove the motherboard from the case. Just remove the cover from the bottom and point the hair dryer directly at the GPU. Let it cool down. Put the cover back on. Start MBP back up.
Curious if adding a bit of no-wash flux to the problem area would yield a better reflowed joint and give a longer term fix?
And this almost always fails again soon. Besides that, there's a lot else that can go wrong. I tried it several times myself just to see if it was some kind of miracle fix, but they worked for half an hour then failed again right away. Get someone to change the GPU, there's plenty of great prices on eBay. It's a part that costs like $15, you just pay for the labor. I get very few returns from this repair, and almost all of them in the warranty period.
To properly treat an Apple product, it's going to take more than 7 minutes to cook it. I'd set the over to 500 degrees F and cook it for at least 2 or 3 hours. Then I'd cut off its head, stuff garlic in its mouth and drive a steak through the CPU.
Yeah I can see why they wanted to remain anonymous...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This will prob be his next video. Sending computer in for repairs. Your doing it wrong.
But will it waffle?
Geeks in Africa have been removing circuit boards and leaving them in the hot sun as a "fix" for years. And dishwashers are great for Dusty tv boards
The symptoms are, in a nutshell: fans running full-blast, yet the system still runs too hot. To me this screams that the heat pipes are faulty.
Yes, they sometimes are either faulty from the factory, or fail shortly after you start using the system. One failure mode is loss of coolant. Another one is through detachment and pooling of the wick material. All the ones I've seen failed still had coolant, but the wick material was loose inside of the pipe, instead of nicely attached to the entirety of the interior surface. A failed heat pipe can't but accelerate the stress fracturing of the solder balls on the chips it services, and the cyclic stress amplitudes will be larger due to larger temperature changes.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
erase hard disk but de-magnetizing with high heat.
Or a piece of string. Or a paper clip.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Back in the day (80's, 90's) when hard drives would refuse to spin up, a similar technique often worked. Take the drive and pop it into a very warm (but too hot) oven, or leave it on a car's dashboard on a hot summer's day. When it's hot enough that it's very uncomfortable to hold, but not hot enough to burn you... quickly drop it back into the system and spin it up. Then.. back up your data.
This'll cure stiction or lubricant problems with the platters.
Get off my lawn.
Using a hair drier is a common technique to fix TVs and the like.
Not as hot as an oven, but easier to control.
I think every person should put all of their Apple device(s) in the oven @ 450F and cook for 1 hour..
Sprinkling a little cinnamon will add a nice flavor..
It will certainly improve things around the world.
This was the topic of a question asked on skeptics stack exchange - http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8601/does-baking-your-graphics-card-fix-it
Bake it.
As Cook and Ive butt fuck in a Chinese Love Hotel in Beijing they will take a "Viagra" moment to bash there heads on the wall to commemorate the "Fuck Apple I will Fix my MacBook in a Microwave", ha ha.
This didn't happen.
Macbooks are RoHS and use silver solder. The softest silver solder flows at a minimum of 681 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kriston
Heatguns are only $10 or $20 at the hardware store (don't bother with expensive ones). MBP early 2008 model, with the usual graphics/Nvidia chip issue. Failed/wouldn't boot 4 years after purchase, and just one month after warranty extension end date we got for the Nvida settlement.
Take out logic board, clean thermal paste off CPU/GPU chip, wrap in board in foil and cut opening for the chip. On a flat heat resietant surface outside, blow over chip with heatgun slowly get closer, one or two minutes max. Leave it alone for at least an hour, then reapply thermal paste (a small drop in the middle), reassemble the bastard and you should be good for 3 months to 1 year. Repeat again when fails. Do not onsell your MBP, no one wants your problems. Give it to your family or friend so you can fix it again later.
Doing it in an oven will create a chemical stink and may cause other components to fail prematurely.
did it taste good?
Considering how paranoid everyone is about cancer causing substances it's not great advice really. Reflowing any electronics in an oven will cause a degree of gas-off and splatter of goodness knows what ( even RoHS compliant ), particularly if you're using flux to assist in the reflow. You should never do this sort of thing with items that'll be used for food later.
On the other hand, if you buy a pizza oven for $19.95 and use it for the reflow, and never use it again for food, then no worries ( still a cheap reflow ).
While Apple are known for custom cooling designs they are also known for building their notebooks very close to the limit when it comes to dissipating heat. So when nVidia twists the truth about the operating temperature of a prospective GPU for their macbook it can have bad consequences. This combined with the well known faults caused by the bad solder bumps on nVidia GPU die has caused the relatively large proportion of early GPU failure rates in various macbook models. Apple and nVidia have tried to mitigate this by effectively under clocking various models through a firmware update to delay the inevitable failure.
Being an owner of such a model I can tell you it's pretty easy to get the fans whiring when using the more powerful GPU and that's even after the under clocking firmware update. Considering how common this is, i'd say it's likely that the heat pipe is fine, the failure rate is accelerated enough with the other two problems..
Here's a guide to how this is done professionally.
I prefer cooking my computers on my Big Green Egg . Indirect heat of course .
Are a fairly common problem in all the Chinese made stuff. And Apple exacerbates it be eschewing fans in their computer. So no surprise you have to reflow the board every now and then.
the problem is the solder balls on bga chips break and the oven reflows them, this has been a problem with many laptop motherboards that use those types of chips. Most notably the hp dv6000 from 2006ish.
https://www.google.com/search?...
lose != loose
In Texas we use a barbecue, like God intended.
If you have the skill set to take your MBP apart and remove the logic board this might be worth a try. If it fails you are no worse off than before, since you were going to have to replace the logic board anyway.
For anybody thinking of trying this at home: it's important to note that it is only the logic board that is going in the oven. Putting the case or the LCD in the oven would be very very bad. And that is pretty much how the logic board got soldered in the first place. They have a fancier oven with digital temperature control, but the principle is still that you heat the board up just past the melting point of solder, keep it there for a short time while the solder flows, and then cool it down.
Kool! Cook your old model and the new one runs for months! Is that better than getting an extended warranty?!
You can quickly charge your iPhone 6 by putting it in the microwave on high for 3 minutes. Try it, it works great!!!
Does this person also need to provide a disclaimer?!
Wouldn't all the cookies stored in the computer end up being overcooked?
But I thought Macs were of superior quality, hence the ridiculous price tag? A manufacturer's defect? Impossible! It just likes a warm oven-based "hug" now and again because you're not loving it enough.
This was done with PS3 repairs to the RSX. Use a bit of liquid flux underneath the major chips. CPU/ GPU, make sure it's all well soaked, clean up around the edges, then bake for the same time and temp. The flux will bind with the solder renewing it some.
What happens often is the solder originally used becomes brittle, baking it will soften it up some, but some of the original properties in the solder have been burned out from overheating issues over time, and including baking. With adding flux, you can restore the original solder and make it less brittle, and it will probably last longer than 8 months. Eventually that solder will need to be replaced though, even flux won't fix it, but you get much longer results from your baking experience if you use some liquid flux.
Flux also helps create a stronger metallurgic bond the solder to the solder points.
I worked for 8 months? That's way longer than my Backed Ziti lasts!
those maker movement type magazines periodically have instructions for putting a better thermostat into an old toaster oven so you can use it to solder boards full of surface mount parts.
it's amazing how heat proof solid state has become. when i started in this biz, with germanium transistors, I built a little light flasher, and decided to pot it in epoxy. the heat of the epoxy setting was enough to fry the transistors. the icing on the cake was that I couldn't salvage any of the other components, as they had been potted in epoxy.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.