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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.
Use a fucking heat gun. Don't back your shit. Jesus, what kind of fucking rookies live in this world?
Unfortunately the defects were in the chips they sourced from nVidia and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, and there's little computer manufacturers could do to avoid it. It's true that Apple runs components fairly hot to reduce fan noise and that accelerated some failures, but the real culprit was the early attempts at lead-free solder companies were using to meet new RoHS standards.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.