Totally awesome, and smart! And you have a ton in your fridge.

Did French’s mustard pay for advertising in your pictures?

Brad

I have used this trick many times and it works like a big, frozen charm. Cheers!

It’s like geek cribs: “You know, we got some mustard, some beers, gotta have beers. And you know, this is where I keep my powerbook. Keepin’ them drives nice and chill.

The freezer works even better.

I often use this trick for my $20 DVD player that easily overheats and doesn’t like to return discs. Fridge=magic.

p.s. mmm, garden fresh salsa.

i thought about this but i was afraid there might be water damage from the fridge or something..
i took mine outside at 3am about 60F out and it worked for an hour before shuttin down.
Im going to put mine in the freezer right now..

Very good idea. My Thinkpad T42p has been terribly overheating due to a fan failure: the graphics card and CPU heat up to about 120 degrees C before my laptop freezes up and all I can do is cut the power and let it cool down. Actually, I just put it in the fridge about 30 minutes ago, then googled “laptop fridge” to see how long I should keep it in there and then I found this blog.

LOL, someone just came in here and asked me why my laptop was in the fridge.

Thought I’d share this, and maybe you’ll post in comments… or just enjoy it yourself. When I lived in Arlington, TX, we were having 115 degree temperatures day after day (perhaps normal for Texas). About a week into this, the stereo in
my car started making a high-pitched, but low-in-volume squeal. Not wanting to replace my expensive CD player, I started detatching the stereo face and storing it in my fridge. This solved the problem permanently (I moved out of Texas and back north, never had the problem again). That CD player was the only thing working when I eventually sold the car for parts.

I’ve been freezing hard drives for my clients since I became a PC technician
more that 15 years ago. The technique is not always successful but works on the
average of about 70 percent of the time.
One tip I’d like to offer: If you have a Seal-a-meal vacuum food sealer or the
like you should always use it before freezing a hard drive to prevent moisture
damage. Lacking that a Ziplock bag will suffice. Sometimes freezing a drive for
15 or 20 minutes will not work but 15 or 20 hours will. The longest I’ve tried
to date was about 48 hours!

would this work with an overheating xbox 360? Not mine… but a friends.

Caleb is your friend really going to play his xbox out of a fridge

Maybe his TV is overheating too. He can just set up his whole system in the kitchen.

This has worked for me many times back in the day. But when I told my buddy to try this on his failing drive, he forgot to take it out of the freezer. It was in there for over an hour. It was frozen solid. I was dying with laughter. He wasn’t to happy though. It was so funny.

In a large Retail environment – if you can’t save the customer’s harddrive info right off the bat – put the drive in the freezer in the back for half an hour. It worked. Sometimes it took multiple times, but we often saved a majority of data.

I think you too need to be there in that fridge. Dam Fool idea….:-x

the problem wasnt just the driver – it was the fact it was a MAC

street smart techniques have their own unique niche in geekdom…..

Glad it worked out for you but you should have just bought SpinRite from GRC.Com. It totally works!

I found the opposite,when warmed up my clicking drive is ok.it’s been clicking for 2 years now,I just try to leave it on.

The freezer trick will also revive the a failing battery for the laptop or cell phone. It wont last long, but you can retrieve a number.

stumbled from california. this is cool i do this with my ipod touch because it overheats haha. it works.

Stumbled from New Zealand….. pretty epic idea. am going to give it a go!

Thats a neat fridge. I believe that works. And for the guy recommended a Freezer.. a Strict no no!!!

U don’t want frost to enter the circuits. Forget increasing the reliability, it would even void ur warranty incase of a slow rust.

Done this a bunch of times! I also had a RAID-array running in the fridge for about a week I desperately needed the RAID-array to be accessible even though the cooling had broken down, so I put it in the fridge with the cables sticking out the door until they sent me a replace

i used to have a vaio that would overheat while trying to burn cds so i would just click burn and throw it in the fridge come back in 10 mins and it was done lol.

Great tip yaaar. Thanks for sharing this!

This works because it cools the bearings inside the spindle moter down so that they shrink and the motor can spin up to speed again. Once they warm up they return to their usual size and the hard drive can’t spin proporly anymore. A symptom of this is the clicking you heard.

What you need to remember is that hard drives are not air tight and that if condensation gets in to your hard drive and lands on the platters then the read heads will crash and that aint cheap to recover data from.

NEVER put your hard drive in the freezer! On older drives this method worked a little bit but with new drives they use Liquid ball bearings in the spindle wich freeze and ruin it forever.

I actually did this with a dorm fridge once. It worked well until we discovered that our ice cream was melting, lol.

what kind of beer is that? looks good.

Hi Adam,
that’s very cool indeed!
Same thing happened to my mother board a couple of years ago. It took weeks to copy my data to an external harddrive, because it would only run for only 2-3 minutes at a time before crashing again. But I had the best results after leaving my laptop in the fridge for a while…

Damn… we should all live ina fridge… and i suddenly got the craving for a sandwich with french´s mustard…

You could have just gotten a lapcool for 30 bucks. That would be a portable fridge for your laptop. Thats exactly how I solved my overheating problems

Coz its running hot and it needs to be cold down

Ive yanked 3.5″ drive and put them in the freezer before, most of the time it works and if youre desperate youll try anything! Apparently the fridge is the ticket

Oh my Gah…my 8 yr old G4 PowerMac had a fatal error, so said the Mac genious. After I shed real tears at the Mac bar I then self-medicated by delighting in the purchase of a
beautiful new iMac. I placed my old Mac in the garage. But now I think I’ll clear out my deep freezer in said garage and let it chill. Perhaps this will resurect old Mac long enough to recover all my pics.
There is hope!! Thanks Scott for sending me this article.

Totally awesome tip, if my HD fails i will be sure to try this out

the freezer works even better

That “beer” is actually Sprecher’s Root Beer. only the best root beer to ever exist on the face of the planet! lol. Only place I’ve ever found it was Menard’s hardware store.

Stumbled from Germany. This is a nice idea thanks for this post I will try it if I got some problems with my laptop but for now he is working good.

Pretty Cool, i used to do this with my old AlienWare (which were notorious for cooling issues

Stumbled from Scotland! That’s an amazing idea, i want to get a custom fridge to fit my pc into. Much less expensive than liquid cooling o.O

Around 1992 while working as a computer engineer I found one of my customers systems was down due to a 40MB Winchester, won’t say who but Veerry well known travel co. Bad news was that they had no backups, no paper records of anything, all vat records etc rtc etc. I took their (Systime S400) system home with me and spent all night putting in the freezer, taking it out, hooking it up and getting it to spin up so I could copy off bits of data bit by bit liietrally. I successfuly retrived all the companies data. The owner was so grateful he gave me a 3 week holiday for 4 in Corfu, with a car and a visiting cook. In a nutshell:
putting a drive in the freezer does work sometimes.

Does this work for a PS3??

hahaha tech win!

well here’s the problem. You used iMovie.

Conclussion: Apples last longer in fridge.

Haha, maybe thats why my gf’s Macbook Pro boot up froze, she always lets her fruit go bad. Maybe Mac Books will come with mini fridges in the near future. =)

Like @ Elias

Stumbled from Florida, I wanna try this one soon!

Stumbled upon this in Denmark. Hmm . . . I wonder if I can fit my desktop tower in my frig. My wife might not go for it, but if it saves files that are not backed-up (Shame! I know.) well, it seems worth losing a few condiments or a pot roast or two.

Stumbled upon this.

Congrats.

But you should be careful if you’re leaving it in there for a more than a few hours. Condensation could form on the circuitry and permanently damage vital components.

found this using Stumble! Very clever… I will definitely try this, should I ever need to (crossing my fingers).

Apple FTW

I put mine in a freezer bag, and then in the freezer.

Stumbled From Australia

Epic Truly thanks i will be sure to give this a go as my hardrive is about to start having issues and im sure that this will help until i can purchase a new one

Stumbled from CO!
Will definitely try this when my next HDD fails! It’s just a matter of time I suppose…

So glad I am using PC’s. No hard drive deaths in 25 years and, if there was, I would not have to worry about voiding warranties to take a look inside and reseat the cables.

When my old laptop finally had overheated and was dying, I had to put it on my air conditioner where the air blasting out was freezing. If I took it off for more than a minute, it would promptly shut down. That air conditioner was the reason I could save all my important files. The fridge doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea either.

Also try a Ziploc back full of ice cubes and rest the computer on this bag with focus on the physical location of the hard drive.

Worked very nicely for me…

My mac gets so hot that I usually put it in the fridge when it’s doing video converting, etc, so that it doesn’t burn my legs off.

Okay, I’m not sure I’m following what the purpose of this is. Can someone explain it in “dumb” terms? I want my computer to work faster and more efficiently, does putting it in your fridge help?

Sorry, just don’t understand.

I worked for a computer repair store for years and I used this trick all the time on nearly dead, clicking, hard drives. It really does work! We would actually wrap a drive in a static bag and tape it all around so that it was air tight and then stick the drive in the freezer for a couple hours. This would bring the temperature down so far that it would take MUCH longer to heat back up and have problems.

I had many thankful customers afterwards when I told them I was able to save their data.

I use a very similar technique with my old MacBook, which overheats in summer (when we regularly get days over 40 degrees C) and the touchpad stops responding. I get a sports gel pack out of the freezer, wrap it in a tea-towel, and sit it on my lap. Has the added advantage of cooling the user as well, and not burning my legs with the heat coming off the computer!

Pure genius!

Hahaha!! That was a good trick .. next time I’m putting my laptop in the fridge if my drive crashes.. lol

Once happened to me (in my n00b days) but i noticed that i was related to the heat… This will be helpfull someday i hope ^^

I did try this before on my external hard disk. I left in overnight on the fridge and it worked. Good thing I read it in a forum.

way to warm your food up bud!
Salmonella ftw!

Stumbled from Mazatlan(MX). Nice tip, fortunately the “over heated device situation” has never happened to me; but I’ll keep this in mind.

There are easier ways to do that..

I always have a fan sitting behind mine. When it starts acting up I turn it on and in less then five minutes it’s back to normal. Thanks for the advice I might end up having to do that sometime when no fan is accessible.

we did this with commodore 64 cassettes that were playing up

i know for a fact this works i have put just the hdd in a feezer and was able to get drives working again sometimes it even revives them for another life.

what is the brand of beer you have beside the frenches?

Stumbled from Bangladesh! Nice idea but isn’t there a chance of moisture buildup in humid conditions?

I would not dare put my macbook, nor any electronic device inside my refrigerator. But since you’ve done it, and since it’s a mac, maybe I might consider.

If you made a case that was water tight you could in theory keep the laptop in the freezer, use a external monitor and keyboard\mouse and have one hell of a cold computer. just watch out for condensation.

condensation will eventually fuck your laptop mate

Got that Power aid behind your power book, I see.

using the freezer works better than the fridge

Let’s have some beers and mustard in celebration!

That’s what happens when you buy an iToy instead of a real computer.

Hi, stumbled here from New York!
I once had an xbox which overheated all the time. So I put it in a bag and into the freezer, and it started to work perfectly

It’s a great tip, and will definitely help if you have a device that overheats.

Remove the existing hard drive and put an SSD (solid state drive)and boot it in the fridge and transfer OS to SSD. Then remove the old HD.

Or … You could move to Canada and use your laptop outdoors as normal ….

Another neat Quick trick for tech’s to save data is a ziplock and canned air, turn the canned air upside down with hard drive in the ziplock and spray the hardrive with the canned air thus freezing the hard drive takes about 45 secs. ^^

Condensation galore.

WOW! This is pretty interesting.

i thought this didn’t happen to mac’s. You know.. only to pc’s

LOL I’ll give this a try someday, I’m sure

well, mabey they wouldnt overheat all the time if the fan wasnt set for low just so that they can be super quiet.
a mac is a pc, running a different operating system and spraypainted. dont fool yourself
Mac antivirus also exists for a reason

a windows or linux system would not have had the problem

I would think putting it in the freezer would be bad as you would almost be gaurenteed condensation and that for sure would fuck up the whole system. Fridge is a great idea tho

Is that mustard?

I thought macs didnt break?
there goes that theory

stumbled from texas! im going to try this with my hd

@ Holoof.. you found a bag big enough to fit an Xbox????

Haha, I do this all the time when my laptop gets too hot!

That’s is so awesome!

Great tip!

That is so awesome

Strangely I have used similar tactics on hard drives in the past. I also left a laptop under the seat of my car one winter and the next morning it worked perfectly