“My MacBook Pro and I had a wild weekend: I reflowed the solder on its logic board three times in one day, then drilled 60 holes in its bottom case,” Sterling writes for iFixit. “Why? I first started noticing heat issues about a year ago. My model of MacBook Pro is notorious for running too hot. And I run mine pretty hard: I’m a programmer for iFixit, and in my spare time, I game and make electronic music. On an average day, my laptop hovered between 80º and 90º C. One time I saw it climb as high as 102º C—hot enough to boil water.”
“So I tried some simple fixes. I blew out the inside of my laptop with compressed air. I bought a laptop stand and stopped using it on my lap. I enabled smcFanControl, a program that lets me run my fans at the max speed of 6200 rpm all the time,” Sterling writes. “But it still ran hot. And one day in March, it died. I was working on it when the screen suddenly went black… The likely fix? Reflow it: Heat it up until the balls of solder melt back into their assigned spots.”
“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 340º F. I put my $900 part on a cookie sheet and baked it for seven nerve-racking minutes,” Sterling writes. “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. Temperatures averaged in the 60s and 70s C — although recently, they began creeping up again… Finally, we sent it back into the oven—for seven and a half minutes, in case getting it a little hotter made a difference. And while it baked, we decided it was time to break out the bigger guns. That is, we pulled out a drill.”
Read the whole sordid story here.
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