Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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"
You obviously haven't figured out how Apple works...
...Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time....
But... but... but... but... I thought Apple's build quality was the best there can be?!?!?
The product only has to last until the next incremental improvement is available.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
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."
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.
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?
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.
Use a heat gun to warp the board, melt the solder and pop the chips right off. An oven gives even heat which will not warp the board.
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.
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.
.
Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time.
This is because of the move to lead-free solder. It has nothing to do with not using enough solder,
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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
Apple did replace or repair a lot of MacBooks with the nVidia solder issues out of warranty. These computers are all four to six years old.
Wouldn't this method melt (and thus remove) tin whiskers, since they are so incredibly thin? Perhaps -that- was his problem, not broken joints.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Try baking him in the oven for 7 minutes at 340 F.
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.
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.
Most products don't have such small traces and such small amounts of solder - they have much larger wires secured by larger blobs of solder. And other products in the same situation from nuclear power plants to satellites have problems with "cat's whiskers," which was why lead was added to solder in the first place..
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.