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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?"
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!
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 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.
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.
That depends on the board design. If the MoBo designer didn't balance the copper density well top-to-bottom it will warp the whole damn thing as if it were a thermostat. Technical term is "potato chip-ing" the board. Seeing as how the initial problem occurred under temperature loads bad design isn't outside the realm of the possible. Or they cheapped out and used thinner copper layers that didn't spread the heat evenly enough laterally. (Though as others have pointed out it may be something INSIDE the chip packages not the MoBo. Also 340F isn't enough to melt solder, particularly lead-free.)
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8