I don't think that there can be a very wide temperature band between "too cold to fix" and "components starting to fall off" for a two-sided board, the temperature band might even be non-existent. (Or is surface tension a function of temperature, enough to hold components at low temps, dropping when hotter?)
But professional repair shops are using a more sophisticated form of the same method. I wonder if the have some kind of adaptive support layer instead of a simple grille or flat surface?
Great writing, I'll make sure to suggest "percussive maintenance" from now on. Still leaves us wondering what would've happened with a less confident chef !
I've done stupider things during last ditch repairs. Once time I replaced the tantalum caps on a board blindly hoping that it would cure a power rail short. I'd never used SMD tants before and didn't know that the band was a + band and not a - band.
Within 3 seconds of applying power, there was a fireworks display which destroyed the board entirely :)
Tantalum caps are great fun. I remember we would booby-trap each other's breadboards with them in EE lab, to this day I'm still extra vigilant about polarity of all components. Measure twice, apply power once.
Regular electrolytic caps also make a nice pop and ball of fuzz, often the shell will fly across the room at good speed. Also they have that unforgettable odor of shame that will follow whatever you were working on for a few hours.
I mean even if the oven were perfectly calibrated for air temperature the radiation from the exposed elements would almost always cause this to happen. He’s basically grilled his motherboard not baked it, try baking a cake in that oven and I bet it’s also burned on the top and soggy in the middle.
The obvious solution if you must use that oven is to wrap the board in silver foil first and it might have had a chance.
That might also keep the vapor from the solder condensing on the oven. I would be worried about using that oven for food in the future. Is apple lead free for it's solder?
I learned on lead solder but quickly moved to lead-free and while there was a learning curve, I am confident that anyone capable of soldering leaded can be just as skilled with lead-free.
They might have antimony, bismuth, or cadmium. All are toxic. Also, many other components on the board could include God-knows-what. I'm not sure what Apple has or hasn't cut out of their stuff, but there's bound to be plenty of bad stuff left in there. I certainly wouldn't want to use that oven again.
The boiling point of lead is 1749°C. You're not going to get lead vapor from the solder at the temperatures of a toaster oven. The smoke is probably from some plastic component or some remaining flux on the board. But yeah, that oven shouldn't be used for food anymore.
Liquid lead has a certain amount of vapor pressure even before it boils. Just like you can have water evaporate even when you're at temperatures below 100 C you can have lead enter the air even when you're below 1749 C.
There is no leaded solder any more in consumer electronics. Even for leaded solder, the smoke comes from the flux core. You'll notice melting unfluxed leaded solder produces essentially no smoke.
Solids also have a vapor pressure. Yes you've increased the vapor pressure, but you're way below the temperature where significant vapors are released.
Nobody really uses lead in electronics anymore unless it's absolutely necessary. RoHS (regulation concerning lead use in electronics in the EU) really worked.
Lead-free solder has it's peculiarities but the industry long ago got used to it and leaded solder is now mostly seen by hobbyists. I've made the move to lead-free and while it's not quite as easy to work with, the peace of mind knowing I've eliminated at least one nasty heavy metal from my hobby is worth it.
That's a myth. Leaded solder is completely safe for those soldering with it. You're never exposed to any lead fumes. Lead in solder is only a concern for the environment when the product is thrown away and that lead gets exposed to animal life.
Apple products have been lead-free for more than a decade.
Too hot. Water would be violently boiling and fat too much contact on the parts in a bag under vacuum.
Reflows ovens work because they allow nothing touching the parts on a level board, the solder paste melts into solder pools and the parts center themselves by surface tension over each pad.
Most of the time if you are hot air soldering and the solder, flux, pad shape, and part are good, you need no positioning tool at all. The solder melts and the part just wiggles itself into place.
I'm not sure why you'd say "too hot". Most sous vide circulators cannot even boil water, so it definitely wouldn't be "violently boiling". The general use is to hold a low temp (eg, 130F) for an extended period of time with little variation (ideally <1 degree F of variation).
Getting the temperature stable without putting pressure on the parts, and also not getting them wet would be challenging, but probably not that much more challenging than doing the same thing in a toaster oven or other regular oven.
130 degrees freedom is about 55 °C which is way too cold for any reflowing to occur. Consider that the failed joints in question will routinely see 70-90 °C in normal operation.
As someone that has done a LOT of reflow work, I'm a little confused why you are arguing such a ridiculous notion.
First off, I think you confused C and F. The author wanted 170ºC in his oven, would would be outside the range of any existing sous vide and would be violent boil.
Second, reflow only works because of the perfectly level and no contact of parts, they need to be free to FLOAT to their destination guided by surface tension.
Oh, sorry, I was joking initially and misinterpreted your remark about it being too hot. You meant that the required temps are too hot for the circulator, which is obvious in hindsight. Thanks for setting me straight. :)
I'd still argue that a sous vide type circulator with a slight modification, a liquid with a higher boiling point, and a container for the board that doesn't involve vacuum sealing, would be better than the raw, unreliable oven in the OP. I bet it would end up costing about as much as a better solution, though.
You may find that Debian with LXDE+Xfce installed (and the non-free repository enabled, for firmware components) will work quite a bit better than Lubuntu for the laptop you picked as your MacBook Air replacement. Recent versions of *buntu seem to be a bit bloated compared to available alternatives, and this especially matters on older hardware.
I actually once (kind of) fixed a permanent startup blue screen on my years-old LG G3 by putting the motherboard in the oven.
It worked again for ~2 months, which gave me plenty of time to backup all local data. Then the blue screen returned and after trying to bake it again, it would not power on at all anymore.
I've baked components before, only once with limited success.
Several years ago I had a 9800GTX graphics card fan go out, and its core temp rose to 117 Celsius[1]. Eventually it died, and I attempted to bake the card to re-flow broken solder. I'm not sure if that actually fix anything, but the card worked for a bit longer.
We used to "fix" our old XBox consoles by wrapping them in towels and purposely overheating them to get the ?GPU? solder to reflow correctly. With some extra cooling methods added, still works to this day even though it got a red ring of death.
If anything lead-free solder would hold up to higher temperatures. The problem was just that the entire thing got too hot in general, there was a whole spell with the PCBs warping because of the heat.
Normal operating loads. My 360 was never in an enclosed space, and it still fell prey to this. I was do the temp fix with a heat gun, but disassembling and reassembling was a pain. I eventually left the board sitting in the open without the case.
I remember doing this in a bar at 2am to one of those electronic paper towel dispensers. They work great, except when they don’t (which is most of the time).
A swift elbow to the side cracks the plastic locking mechanism, dropping the cover and freeing the roll.
I don't understand America's fascination with these. I first visited the US over 15 years ago and they were everywhere, but since then I don't think I've even seen a single one in the UK.
It’s often in the building code or local bylaws. They don’t have to be automatic, but there’s probably evidence showing that the automatic ones reduce overutilization.
Or do you mean the UK just uses air dryers? The newer vortex ones work ok, but the previous ones were useless, which encourages people to not wash their hands at all.
Only having 1.5kw to work with probably didn’t help.
Difference here is that overheating the GPU will always apply heat directly to the specific solder area in question. It’s actually a pretty good trick.
I also had the overheating RROD. The problem with the 360 was the CPU heatsink mounting hardware was insufficient to maintain contact and the board would warp. It was easy enough to fix with a set of screws from the hardware store to replace the crappy 'X' clip, plus some PC thermal grease like Arctic Silver.
Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.
I fixed the first RROD on an Elite (Falcon) by re-balling the solder joints using a hair dryer. The next fix was an identical process to yours and it still works.
After doing the towel trick I laid my 360 on top of a big fan so it always had cool air being forced into it. It was RROD-free until eventually a thunderstorm took it out for good along with my router.
I sort of wonder if using a heat gun in the area they thought was broken would have worked better. Then it would have been more localized and easier to control temperature-wise.
I heated a Nvidia 780 graphics card a few times using a heat gun and a laser thermometer (max 200 degree c). I did not want to use my oven as I don't want to risk it. That revived the gpu 2 times, going from vga quality and weird screen artifacts, to no issues at all, 2-3 months with each bake. In the end i bought a new one as it really is temporary.
I repaired a 2009 iMac gpu the same way with a heat gun but that was good for two years each time the first two times and didn’t work the third time. It’s worth a shot if you strongly suspect broken solder ball.
Same here, for the same equipement. Did not use heatgun but oven, wrapped in tinfoil. Same results as you reported. Finally sourced a compatible GPU from eBay, an ATI 5xxx from the next model year iMac. It was much much cheaper than sourcing an ATI 4xxx.
Opening the iMac the first time was very stressful.
A possible (probable?) issue is your oven. In my experience, they heat in cycles: if you set one to 180 it will heat to 240, then cool to 150, then .... Etc. Even a large electric range will cycle with a range of temperatures. In other words they are designed to maintain an average temperature rather than constant.
In addition there issue of calibration. Even expensive full size ovens can be significantly off.
How do I know this? I worked with Japanese laquer (Urushi) which was baked onto metal for bonding. But Urushi is the sap of a tree related to poison oak and over-heating leads to fumes that are not great. Experiments with small (toaster) ovens and large electric ranges produced bad results.
Most electric kilns for ceramics, especially those that are computer controlled, are highly recommended for sensitive work where temperature control is important.
Would a heat gun and an infrared thermometer perhaps be better - don't know if you risk blowing the components off the board though. Maybe on a lower setting.
I think a heat gun would + tweezers would probably be sufficient enough, however, he'll probably need to reference ifixit images to figure out where things need to go.
I think it's a bit too difficult to hold a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, a set of tweezers and flux, so I would just get a feel by testing it out with some other busted PCB.
Likely. Kitchen ovens and small ovens in general do not have the accuracy required to reflow. As you say, they will cycle between full power and no power and rely on the large oven hysteresis to get an average temperature which is OK for cooking, but can be easily off by 10+C at times, even if ventilated.
One solution is to wrap the item in something which acts as a dampener. A couple of layers of crumpled tinfoil will help.
Note that you definitely can reflow in a low-end kitchen oven with the appropriate changes ;). I built two small ovens for reflowing. Search for "arduino reflow" for some pointers.
I’m familiar with this from a couple of interests, too. One is trying to decarboxylate cannabis to prepare it to make edible goods. You want to hold it under 250° for a period of time, and the quality of the temperature controller and other factors about your oven or toaster oven do make a big difference. Overheating can ruin it fairly easily, and underheating fails to produce full potency.
Also we run into this in a glassblowing. One wants borosilicate items to rest in the kiln somewhere between 1040 and 1100 F (~600C). The simplest kilns have a infinite switch, same as an electric range. With attention and experience, it’s possible to make it steadily hold a temperature. More common these days is a digital controller. The simplest is something like a Fuji PXR3. However, just having a digital controller does not ensure that your kiln stays at the target temperature. The controller must be calibrated properly for the oven size, elements and insulation. In most kilns elements are either on all the way or off, so controllers use a relay to control power. The more sophisticated ones do this very quickly, like flickering. Typical controllers do cycles of a few seconds. If the controller is not calibrated properly, which is common in glass studios, the kiln will overshoot or undershoot the target temperature repeatedly by up to 50°. It’s complicated by the fact that these kilns sometimes have doors that remain partially open, and the amount of mass of glass inside affects the thermal characteristics, too.
For a very precise small oven, the ones that they make for enamel or firing dental porcelain are pretty good.
As anyone who has tried to bake in an oven in a rental has found out...I finally bought an oven thermometer and my oven will easily go 100ºF over the indicated temperature. I literally either cut baking time in half or lower the oven dial by ~100º.
If you’re lowering the temperature by 100 degrees, your problem isn’t the temperature swing. It’s that your oven’s internal thermistor needs replacement.
>> Even expensive full size ovens can be
>> significantly off.
It's funny how often the cooks complain about the ovens not being accurate on the Bon Appetit YouTube channel. There are 3rd party thermometers installed in each one.
The ovens are Viking or Fisher and Pytel or something, high-cost ovens that the average home chef would dream of. And they stink!
In praise of American build quality (at least back in the 1960s): My GE electric oven, installed when my house was built in 1967 — 52 years ago — is dead-on accurate when tested with a third-party Taylor oven thermometer. Full disclosure: one of the four burners on top is non-functional.
> It's funny how often the cooks complain about the ovens not being accurate on the Bon Appetit YouTube channel.
I wonder if it's more the cooks than it is the oven.
My wife once worked at a shop where she had to prepare fresh-baked cookies from scratch, and their oven was often "on the glitch". The owner of the shop also owned a pizza place next door.
So when the oven went on the fritz, she'd do what any self-sufficient cook would do, and borrow the commercial gas pizza oven next door.
Now mind you - this was a commercial full-sized pizza oven, running at an insane temperature - well over 700 degrees. But it was a consistent temperature...
...so my wife would pop 'em in, wait an appropriate amount of time while also watching the cookies closely, then pull them out when they were properly cooked.
They'd turn out perfectly every time. That isn't to say you could cook anything at that increased temperature - you can't. But there are many things you can do, if you know what the heck you're doing.
Sometimes you gotta make due with the tools at your disposal, because you may not have a choice otherwise. Or at least try to do it. If things hadn't gone right with the cookies, in the trash they would've went - but it went so well, my wife started to learn how to use that pizza oven for all it was worth, because it was usually always at temperature and consistent.
The point I was trying to make was to use the tools you have at your disposal. My wife had access to a "flaky oven" (half the time it wouldn't turn on) - or she could use an oven that worked properly, albeit at a very high temperature that for many people, would burn the heck out of anything you put in it.
In the case of the youtube channel - which I don't know about anything either - maybe, if the ovens didn't hold a proper temperature, they should have just cranked it to max temperature, not worried about what the temperature actually was - and just cooked with that?
It would of course depend on what was being cooked; there's a world of difference between say, roasting some potatoes at high temperature, and baking a souffle or something delicate like that. You probably couldn't do the latter in a high temperature oven properly.
But ultimately, most cooking is essentially controlled burning. If you can do that, you can cook many things. Not everything, but enough.
Actual baking on the other hand - a lot of it involves accuracy and chemistry, and if you don't have control over the whole process, then the recipe will fail every time. If that were the case with that youtube channel (quite likely), then doing any kind of a "hack" with an oven probably won't work out well.
I found this to be the case for mid-level espresso machines as well. Luckily it is fairly simple to add a PID controller and a more accurate platinum temperature sensor to hold the brew temp to within a few degrees Celsius for a much more consistent extraction.
After flickering unhappily for a while, part of the screen backlight on my trusty Lenovo laptop recently died, rendering screen usable but hightly annoying. Short of actually buying a spare part and swapping out, I did absolutely everything imaginable, including liberal amounts of percussive maintenance: Opened the thing up, had the whole screen out, checked connections as best I could, squeezed and flexed, had the screen out again, squeezed some more - you know how these things go.
So, the machine is stranded on my desk, hooked up to a stationary screen, lid kept slightly ajar. The most laidback member of the household comes by, a fully grown male of species felis catus. Apparently slams the lid shut and goes to sleep on laptop for the duration of the night.
I had the same issue with my MacBook Air with the exact specs, though I never dropped mine. Just shut it off one night after watching Thrones for a few hours and it never turned back. Pleaded with Apple for quite a while to see if they would replace the logic board due to defect, but they did not. Mine was purchased in May 2013 and dead Nov 2014. Finally broke down a couple of years ago and bought a low end I3, with 4gb of ram logic board and it's working again. Guess I would have tried this as well had i known it was an option at the time :)
Unfortunately I sent the whole thing back to the repair shop and I'm guessing they probably sold it. In hindsight I should have taken it out prior to sending it to them...
Does anyone ever try to address these issues with a soldering iron? I assume these machine soldered boards have connections too fine or too inaccessible to solder individual connections. But if you are trying something as crude as baking the board.. maybe there is some way?
Most likely, one of the bigger chips would have developed a cracked contact, simply because of the bigger surface would introduce more stress if the whole board was deformed/shocked. Now, those BGA's, you cannot solder them with a soldering iron, reflowing is the only option.
Depends on what you're doing and how patient you are- I know several people that have done similarly with kitchen-grade toaster ovens, thermocouples, and relays / SSR's to manage temperature and get professional-quality results. It's within reason that someone with a laser thermometer or such to be able to manually do the same thing.
Longer answer... well... two components I can specifically think of can be effected by shock and vibration:
1. Spinning disk hard drives are one, although you could probably debate this because there are protections in place. The idea being read, shock, corrupted read now in ram. Head of a hard drive should park itself under shock, and checksum bits should protect against bad reads.
2. The other is crystal isolators. XTALs are tuning forks. And if you physically hit them the right way, they vibrate. It’s absolutely possible to induce a pulse per minute variance with a crystal oscillator under vibration. A lot of Apple products are moving to MEMS clocks, which are silicon “solid-state”, do not suffer the same problem, smaller, cheaper, but have other issues (remember that story about iPhones dying in the hospital because someone vented the helium? MEMS can die in helium, but the story was nonsense, not even slightly enough ratios to actually affect phones). Don’t know if you could hit a crystal oscillator so hard and so sharp that you actually injected a full clock cycle into a running device, but, answer the question yeah it kind of sort of could be possible to corrupt ram with a shock to a crystal and probably ceramic clock.
Bad soldering is bad soldering. Microsoft's XBox 360 had huge issues with it.
The problem is that it works from a QA perspective: They can test the thing for hours and it'll run flawlessly. It's only when it goes through hundreds of heating/cooling cycles that it starts to break down and cause problems.
You really never know which product or vendor is going to suffer from it next. Every GPU vendor has had some issues.
I got red-ringed and I didn't swear off of buying Microsoft products forever.
I was gonna chime in on 360's and saw your comment. The best solution that didn't involve replacing solder was a reflow combined with case mods to add screws that better stabilized the board directly around the problem chips which limited board warping so the inevitable solder melting heat cycles did not result in connection failures upon cooling, IME. There was rumblings that lead-free solder was a requirement for 'toy' classification but I can't confirm.
The whole industry was moving lead-free but the first companies to do it were the ones that had the least experience with how to manage the reflow temperature profiles.
It's not just toys. Lead solder is being phased out for many applications.
If I recall correctly, Louis Rossmann claimed official Apple repair center baked some motherboards as well. I don't have a link to exact video, but it is probably covered here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8
Back in the early 2000s my iMac (Lime G3/400), which ran constantly, wouldn’t turn on after being shut off and cooling down. It definitely didn’t fit in the oven, but it’s ass went in anyhow, with the monitor hanging out the front of the oven.
It came back on and worked for a couple more years... the next cool down killed it for good though. No amount of baking would bring it back. Granted, I didn’t pull the logic board (I’d upgraded to a G4 by then)...
Oh, the G4. My favourite Mac ever. It's aesthetics are unprecedented. I still run one in my studio - with dozens of GB of 360p formatted old shows like classic Simpsons and the 1985 Twilight Zone, and tossed a SEGA, GBA and NES emulator on it with a little USB game controller for when I need to unwind.
Trying to randomly unsolder and put back resistors or other components when you don’t know what the error is is another bad idea.
The author should have tried to actually attempt to fix the logic board first. But before all that he should have inspected the board and use a voltmeter to see what the issue is. But even doing that he might need a replacement part.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadBut professional repair shops are using a more sophisticated form of the same method. I wonder if the have some kind of adaptive support layer instead of a simple grille or flat surface?
It's surprisingly hurtful if one of those little fuckers explodes between your thumb and index finger.
Regular electrolytic caps also make a nice pop and ball of fuzz, often the shell will fly across the room at good speed. Also they have that unforgettable odor of shame that will follow whatever you were working on for a few hours.
The obvious solution if you must use that oven is to wrap the board in silver foil first and it might have had a chance.
Despite what everyone says lead free isn’t all that bad.
Lead-free solder has it's peculiarities but the industry long ago got used to it and leaded solder is now mostly seen by hobbyists. I've made the move to lead-free and while it's not quite as easy to work with, the peace of mind knowing I've eliminated at least one nasty heavy metal from my hobby is worth it.
I remember it was a common discussion topic for the Nvidia 8800GT.
Apple products have been lead-free for more than a decade.
True, As long as you wash your hands after handling it.
Reflows ovens work because they allow nothing touching the parts on a level board, the solder paste melts into solder pools and the parts center themselves by surface tension over each pad.
Most of the time if you are hot air soldering and the solder, flux, pad shape, and part are good, you need no positioning tool at all. The solder melts and the part just wiggles itself into place.
Getting the temperature stable without putting pressure on the parts, and also not getting them wet would be challenging, but probably not that much more challenging than doing the same thing in a toaster oven or other regular oven.
First off, I think you confused C and F. The author wanted 170ºC in his oven, would would be outside the range of any existing sous vide and would be violent boil.
Second, reflow only works because of the perfectly level and no contact of parts, they need to be free to FLOAT to their destination guided by surface tension.
I'd still argue that a sous vide type circulator with a slight modification, a liquid with a higher boiling point, and a container for the board that doesn't involve vacuum sealing, would be better than the raw, unreliable oven in the OP. I bet it would end up costing about as much as a better solution, though.
It worked again for ~2 months, which gave me plenty of time to backup all local data. Then the blue screen returned and after trying to bake it again, it would not power on at all anymore.
Several years ago I had a 9800GTX graphics card fan go out, and its core temp rose to 117 Celsius[1]. Eventually it died, and I attempted to bake the card to re-flow broken solder. I'm not sure if that actually fix anything, but the card worked for a bit longer.
Eventually I had to replace it.
[1] http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii191/om3n07/WHOA.jpg
A swift elbow to the side cracks the plastic locking mechanism, dropping the cover and freeing the roll.
Or do you mean the UK just uses air dryers? The newer vortex ones work ok, but the previous ones were useless, which encourages people to not wash their hands at all.
Only having 1.5kw to work with probably didn’t help.
Hand dryers get dedicated circuits. They aren't limited to residential outlet specs.
Wrap them up in blankets, powered on, and wait a few hours.
Relatively speaking, the CPU heatsink was massive compared to the GPU. I would assume the engineers designing it knew that the CPU was going to run very hot, especially when it launched on a 90nm architecture.
Opening the iMac the first time was very stressful.
In addition there issue of calibration. Even expensive full size ovens can be significantly off.
How do I know this? I worked with Japanese laquer (Urushi) which was baked onto metal for bonding. But Urushi is the sap of a tree related to poison oak and over-heating leads to fumes that are not great. Experiments with small (toaster) ovens and large electric ranges produced bad results.
Most electric kilns for ceramics, especially those that are computer controlled, are highly recommended for sensitive work where temperature control is important.
I think it's a bit too difficult to hold a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, a set of tweezers and flux, so I would just get a feel by testing it out with some other busted PCB.
One solution is to wrap the item in something which acts as a dampener. A couple of layers of crumpled tinfoil will help.
Note that you definitely can reflow in a low-end kitchen oven with the appropriate changes ;). I built two small ovens for reflowing. Search for "arduino reflow" for some pointers.
For a very precise small oven, the ones that they make for enamel or firing dental porcelain are pretty good.
Sous vide, big green egg grills, induction ranges, some of the air fryers, etc. It’s all about precision temperature.
It's funny how often the cooks complain about the ovens not being accurate on the Bon Appetit YouTube channel. There are 3rd party thermometers installed in each one.
The ovens are Viking or Fisher and Pytel or something, high-cost ovens that the average home chef would dream of. And they stink!
I wonder if it's more the cooks than it is the oven.
My wife once worked at a shop where she had to prepare fresh-baked cookies from scratch, and their oven was often "on the glitch". The owner of the shop also owned a pizza place next door.
So when the oven went on the fritz, she'd do what any self-sufficient cook would do, and borrow the commercial gas pizza oven next door.
Now mind you - this was a commercial full-sized pizza oven, running at an insane temperature - well over 700 degrees. But it was a consistent temperature...
...so my wife would pop 'em in, wait an appropriate amount of time while also watching the cookies closely, then pull them out when they were properly cooked.
They'd turn out perfectly every time. That isn't to say you could cook anything at that increased temperature - you can't. But there are many things you can do, if you know what the heck you're doing.
Sometimes you gotta make due with the tools at your disposal, because you may not have a choice otherwise. Or at least try to do it. If things hadn't gone right with the cookies, in the trash they would've went - but it went so well, my wife started to learn how to use that pizza oven for all it was worth, because it was usually always at temperature and consistent.
- The chefs on said youtube channel complain about the temperature being non-consistent on their ovens.
- Your wife also ran into this problem with her oven.
- Your wife was able to cook using a pizza oven, which did NOT display this problem.
- Therefore, the chefs from the channel are bad chefs, worse than your wife.
I have not watched this youtube channel and cannot comment on the skill of the chefs, but your comment's conclusion does not logically follow.
The point I was trying to make was to use the tools you have at your disposal. My wife had access to a "flaky oven" (half the time it wouldn't turn on) - or she could use an oven that worked properly, albeit at a very high temperature that for many people, would burn the heck out of anything you put in it.
In the case of the youtube channel - which I don't know about anything either - maybe, if the ovens didn't hold a proper temperature, they should have just cranked it to max temperature, not worried about what the temperature actually was - and just cooked with that?
It would of course depend on what was being cooked; there's a world of difference between say, roasting some potatoes at high temperature, and baking a souffle or something delicate like that. You probably couldn't do the latter in a high temperature oven properly.
But ultimately, most cooking is essentially controlled burning. If you can do that, you can cook many things. Not everything, but enough.
Actual baking on the other hand - a lot of it involves accuracy and chemistry, and if you don't have control over the whole process, then the recipe will fail every time. If that were the case with that youtube channel (quite likely), then doing any kind of a "hack" with an oven probably won't work out well.
Get a better oven. A 90 degree Celsius swing is insane. Ovens do generally have some amount of swing but it should’t be anything close to that.
Words to live by. :)
So, the machine is stranded on my desk, hooked up to a stationary screen, lid kept slightly ajar. The most laidback member of the household comes by, a fully grown male of species felis catus. Apparently slams the lid shut and goes to sleep on laptop for the duration of the night.
Machine has been fine ever since.
Is this a plausible diagnosis?
Longer answer... well... two components I can specifically think of can be effected by shock and vibration:
1. Spinning disk hard drives are one, although you could probably debate this because there are protections in place. The idea being read, shock, corrupted read now in ram. Head of a hard drive should park itself under shock, and checksum bits should protect against bad reads.
2. The other is crystal isolators. XTALs are tuning forks. And if you physically hit them the right way, they vibrate. It’s absolutely possible to induce a pulse per minute variance with a crystal oscillator under vibration. A lot of Apple products are moving to MEMS clocks, which are silicon “solid-state”, do not suffer the same problem, smaller, cheaper, but have other issues (remember that story about iPhones dying in the hospital because someone vented the helium? MEMS can die in helium, but the story was nonsense, not even slightly enough ratios to actually affect phones). Don’t know if you could hit a crystal oscillator so hard and so sharp that you actually injected a full clock cycle into a running device, but, answer the question yeah it kind of sort of could be possible to corrupt ram with a shock to a crystal and probably ceramic clock.
https://rossmanngroup.com/
Reballing flip chip GPUs is BULLSHIT - the truth about dead laptop GPUs & repairing them. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AcEt073Uds
Luckily, he also shows the proper way to do it:
Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shn7LdIrViQ
The problem is that it works from a QA perspective: They can test the thing for hours and it'll run flawlessly. It's only when it goes through hundreds of heating/cooling cycles that it starts to break down and cause problems.
You really never know which product or vendor is going to suffer from it next. Every GPU vendor has had some issues.
I got red-ringed and I didn't swear off of buying Microsoft products forever.
It's not just toys. Lead solder is being phased out for many applications.
And yes, I use Dell :)
It came back on and worked for a couple more years... the next cool down killed it for good though. No amount of baking would bring it back. Granted, I didn’t pull the logic board (I’d upgraded to a G4 by then)...
Trying to randomly unsolder and put back resistors or other components when you don’t know what the error is is another bad idea.
The author should have tried to actually attempt to fix the logic board first. But before all that he should have inspected the board and use a voltmeter to see what the issue is. But even doing that he might need a replacement part.