I would recommend just chilling the drive, and using an external enclosure to read the data. Less risk of killing a whole laptop's worth of electronics with condensation, less warmup time wasted in booting, etc.
The difference is here, that you can tell if something has been opened, but it is nearly impossible to tell if something has been 'friged.' Apple can only void your warranty if they can catch you. And please don't mention that he 'posted on the internet' so the Apple store will catch him; we all know the prob of that is zeroish.
So, I think it is safe to say for all intents and purposes refrigerating your computer doesn't void your warranty.
Well, if there's enough condensation, they might catch you. Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones? The ones that permanently change color when they get wet so that they know that the phone got wet?
Don't refrigerators and freezers have lower-than-normal condensation? Put a loaf of bread or cookies in the refrigerator and they will be dry by the end of the day.
Condensation happens when the article is reintroduced to a warm, damp environment -- ask anyone who wears glasses in winter. Photographers will often put cold-soaked bodies and lenses into ziploc bags before going indoors after an outdoor shoot in winter, maintaining the low-humidity environment until the equipment has reached room temperature.
I'm not sure about Powerbooks, but even in unibody Macbook Pros, both the HD and RAM are considered user-serviceable without voiding the warranty. There's an entire section of the manual dedicated to swapping them.
The hard drives in aluminum PowerBooks, older MacBook Pros, and virtually every other Apple laptop except the MacBooks and unibody MacBook Pros are not user-serviceable.
They aren't easy to get to: it takes a couple hours and ~50 screws to swap the drive in my 12" Powerbook — but it doesn't violate the warranty to do so.
They probably wouldn't have covered it if you obviously fucked it up while taking it apart, but there was never anti-tamper tape or anything in there to directly detect that you'd done so.
I had a dell where the power connector socket went bad, it would literally smoke if you tried to plug power into it to charge it. I took the hard drive out and shipped it back driveless without any problems. Got a newer model replacement laptop and a free external (well, $15 enclosure) for the inconvenience of using my desktop for a week.
A fridge is typically quite dry and is a good spot to put stuff that needs to dry out (dry-aged meat for example). A unit like he had with an attached freezer uses the air from the freezer to cool the fridge portion and the freezer air is really dry.
Comments
I would recommend just chilling the drive, and using an external enclosure to read the data. Less risk of killing a whole laptop's worth of electronics with condensation, less warmup time wasted in booting, etc.
He mentioned that the reason he didn't do that was to avoid voiding the warranty.
i'd be shocked if refrigerating it didn't
The difference is here, that you can tell if something has been opened, but it is nearly impossible to tell if something has been 'friged.' Apple can only void your warranty if they can catch you. And please don't mention that he 'posted on the internet' so the Apple store will catch him; we all know the prob of that is zeroish.
So, I think it is safe to say for all intents and purposes refrigerating your computer doesn't void your warranty.
Well, if there's enough condensation, they might catch you. Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones? The ones that permanently change color when they get wet so that they know that the phone got wet?
Don't refrigerators and freezers have lower-than-normal condensation? Put a loaf of bread or cookies in the refrigerator and they will be dry by the end of the day.
Condensation happens when the article is reintroduced to a warm, damp environment -- ask anyone who wears glasses in winter. Photographers will often put cold-soaked bodies and lenses into ziploc bags before going indoors after an outdoor shoot in winter, maintaining the low-humidity environment until the equipment has reached room temperature.
[EDIT: spelling and capitalisation]
> Do laptops have the water-damage-sensing things that they put in cell phones?
No.
If you manage to get the temperature in your fridge up to 10°C you are good[1].
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html
That's pretty easy really. It's usually around 35-40 F, 10C is 50F, so just leaving your door cracked will probably accomplish that.
In fact I suspect the Macbook's own heat would keep it above that while copying the files.
If it hadn't worked, he may not have posted about it, and then no one would know that it had been in the fridge...
Sorry, I accidentally hit the down arrow on your comment when I meant to hit the "reply" link. :-(
Could someone reverse my mistake? The parent comment does not deserve downmodding.
Especially, if you post pictures of the deed to your blog and it shows up on Hacker News! :)
I'm not sure about Powerbooks, but even in unibody Macbook Pros, both the HD and RAM are considered user-serviceable without voiding the warranty. There's an entire section of the manual dedicated to swapping them.
The hard drives in aluminum PowerBooks, older MacBook Pros, and virtually every other Apple laptop except the MacBooks and unibody MacBook Pros are not user-serviceable.
They aren't easy to get to: it takes a couple hours and ~50 screws to swap the drive in my 12" Powerbook — but it doesn't violate the warranty to do so.
They probably wouldn't have covered it if you obviously fucked it up while taking it apart, but there was never anti-tamper tape or anything in there to directly detect that you'd done so.
I had a dell where the power connector socket went bad, it would literally smoke if you tried to plug power into it to charge it. I took the hard drive out and shipped it back driveless without any problems. Got a newer model replacement laptop and a free external (well, $15 enclosure) for the inconvenience of using my desktop for a week.
A fridge is typically quite dry and is a good spot to put stuff that needs to dry out (dry-aged meat for example). A unit like he had with an attached freezer uses the air from the freezer to cool the fridge portion and the freezer air is really dry.