How baking your MacBook Pro could solve persistent heat issues

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If you've cooked it this much, it may be beyond help. Photo: Wikipedia/Secumem CC
If you've cooked your notebook this much, it may be beyond help. Photo: Wikipedia/Secumem CC

Reading that someone decided to put their MacBook Pro in the oven and then set about drilling holes in it sounds like one of those inane YouTube videos showing someone destroying a perfectly good computer for no reason whatsoever.

For iFixit employee “Sterling,” however, it was not a way to destroy his MacBook at all, but rather a means by which to extend the life of a dying machine.

“Unconventional electronics repair tools they may be, but that’s how I saved my MacBook Pro with a drill and an oven,” Sterling writes.

Here’s how he did it.

Sterling says that he first started noticing heat issues with his MacBook Pro around a year ago, noting that his notebook constantly hovered between temperatures of 80º and 90º C, and once reached as high as 102º C.

At first, he tried some simple fixes, like blowing out the inside of his MacBook with compressed air, using a laptop stand instead of his lap, and enabling smcFanControl: a program which lets him run his MacBook fans at their max speed of 6200 rpm all the time. None of it worked.

Deciding to have a go at “reflowing” his MacBook Pro, Sterling opened up the back of the laptop and disconnected all 11 eleven connectors and three heat sinks from the logic board. Next he heated his oven to 340º F, popped his notebook inside, and waited for seven minutes.

The reason for this was that Steling was convinced the extreme temperature had caused the board to flex, knocking solder loose from its ball grid arrays. “The likely fix?” he writes. “Heat it up until the balls of solder melt back into their assigned spots.”

Sterling then reapplied thermal paste, put the MacBook back together, and found that it worked again — at least for a few months.

When his notebook died again recently, he gave it the oven treatment once more, but also broke out a drill with a 1/16” bit, and drilled 60 “speed holes” in the bottom case.

“There’s noticeably increased airflow,” he writes. “When I put a piece of paper on the bottom of the computer, it sticks to the case. Its average temperature is down in the 40s and 50s, lower than it’s been since before March.”

While Sterling says it’s too early for a final verdict, his Mac has been running without incident for a little over two weeks. It’s definitely a neat fix if you feel capable of it (here’s a video of a similar fix being carried out on an Xbox 360.)

For the majority of users, we’d still recommend the Genius Bar, though.

Source: iFixit

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