6 ms·

I fixed my broken monitor with a hair dryer

291 points by nor0x 4y ago

r0m4n0 4y ago
Kinda reminded me of the time I used listerine on my MacBook screen and it solved the gross reflective coating issue that apple wouldn’t fix for me. Crazy part is it worked Context: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/gho3s4/my_macbook_pro_before_and_after_i_used_listerine/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/gho3s4/m...
bayindirh 4y ago
I had a similar problem with some small exotic parts on my Hyundai L90D+. After being able to source them, I replaced the parts, and my monitor came back to life, briefly. After 30 minutes or so, another part of the board has fried, so I just replaced the monitor, quite sadly.
rompic 4y ago
Had a similar issue with an old samsung synchmaster. The capacitors were the problem. There are a lot of similar 10 year old reports on the net. E.g.: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24494&highlight=AL2416 https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24494&highlig...
- rompic 4y ago
  https://badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69534 https://badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69534 says it's most likely the regulator on this screen
- jarenmf 4y ago
  Bad caps was a very common problem in the old days, I remember I replaced the ones on my motherboard at least twice. The classical symptom was that heating the motherboard will allow the PC to start.
  - rompic 4y ago
    Yes,"Capacitor plague" it was called. There's an interesting story about espionage and incomplete stolen formula in the wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
howard941 4y ago
Reminds me of temporarily recovering 5.25" IDE drives by freezing them overnight
emkoemko 4y ago
i wonder if this would help my issue, my 165hz monitor is not usable anymore at 165hz it flickers, has weird grainy image and what looks like scan lines. Had to use it at 144hz for a while as it didn't happen there but after some time i had to go to 120hz and now 120hz is starting to degrade also : (
abofh 4y ago
I feel like this is that story about the factory... 1$ - Blowing a hairdryer at the monitor 9,999$ - Knowing where to point the hair dryer...
- mdrzn 4y ago
  lol definitely. I would have no idea where to start to find that fix, or even where to find the schematics!
unwind 4y ago
The core analysis seems to be: > A common issue with these types of components is that the quiescent current which ensures for the internal circuitry to work properly depends on the ambient temperature. If it’s too low and the regular doesn’t have enough supply current left the output appears to be dead. Which honestly makes very little sense to me, and also reads a bit like a terminology tombola. A quick googling did not turn up more material on the idea that voltage regulators depend on the temperature like that, and it would be surprising (generally electronics performs better when cooled). I would expect the problem to be due to a bad solder joint, which would explain why heating it helps since it might make the solder flow a little bit back into making connection (although hair dryer temperatures at 200°F/93°C) are too low to properly reflow solder). Or it might just make components and/or solder expand enough to make contact (which is kind of the same thing but different). All real hardware experts, please explain. :)
- pie314isi 4y ago
  I agree, it makes no sense. I am a real hardware electronics engineer and I don't understand his explanation. I believe the LDO could fail in a temperature dependent way. I do not believe the explanation.
  - madengr 4y ago
- jonsen 4y ago
  > ...a bad solder joint Or inside the IC a bad bonding between the chip and the package leads. Or IC package developed cracks and moisture creeps in.
- laci37 4y ago
  I am not an expert, just a hobbyist. It's hard to tell anything without measurements. Either the regulators are half dead (factory spec for operating temperature is -40 to +85 C°) and should be replaced, or thermal expansion causes a cracked solder joint to touch again, or some other component is half dead and needs a bit of warmth to work properly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gijsnijholt1980 4y ago
Can confirm that this saved our old Samsung lcd television. It took longer and longer to turn on. Some guy on YouTube used this hair dryer trick. So I did just that, blow the air inside the TV from below through the panels, and like magic it works again. Life hack! Curious why it works though
richardfey 4y ago
I feel like I missed out on the 3D hype and I am a bit nostalgic now
- devwastaken 4y ago
  Better done with VR headsets. Few games supported monitor VR, and they didn't do that great of a job.
  - cestith 4y ago
    Active LCD shutter glasses for 3D movies were much nicer than 3D gaming that way. Sadly, so little content came out for those setups that the fad passed.
f311a 4y ago
My old Benq monitor was blinking for the fist 10-20 minutes when I turn it on and I used similar trick. I knew nothing about electronics and used common sense. I would direct hair dryer towards air vents of the monitor and wait for 30 seconds. I got bored after a month repeating the same thing every day and sold it unrepaired.
adav 4y ago
Sandwich one of those silly cheapo USB mug warmers into the case. Plug it in briefly for a little warmth just to get it going. Like a choke on an old-fashioned car!
- tomxor 4y ago
  Certainly satisfies the quirkiness factor :) Extra points if you can squeeze in linear actuator for an actual choke switch. Also good to think of alternative fixes like this when it's difficult to source replacement components.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Proceed with caution. Not to be a worry wart, but a long time ago we got a batch of monitors with a defective board. A capacitor overheated, melted some sort of glue on an adjacent component, which in turn dripped on a power supply component, shorted out and started a fire. A couple of days later, it happened again… and we ended up getting all hands on deck to find those monitors.
  - jonsen 4y ago
    That would probably be electrolyte leaking. There are several reports/stories about bad quality capacitors unintentionally used in production.
Tade0 4y ago
I would never guess that a piece of even consumer hardware was designed with such low tolerances as to develop such issues. Is this some kind of a trend that I'm not up to date with? I was surprised to find out that my laptop fans started first getting noisy and then rattling after less than two years since purchase. I searched around and apparently the tight tolerances combined with low quality of the bearings eventually produce this effect. This is especially audible if I let them heat up - it appears that thermal expansion is enough for the blades to get too close to the housing. I ordered a set of new ones and appropriate tools, but I can't imagine doing this every two years. My previous laptop lasted around seven, after which both the battery and the power socket gave out.
- slig 4y ago
  Isn't that just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence ?
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  If this is the case, you could consider bearingless fans, which should prevent them from wearing out. The only issue is you may not be able to find them in the size requirement you need. Good luck !
- Fradow 4y ago
  He's talking about a 12 years-old screen that probably saw daily use. Something failing at that point is more than expected. As others have noted, it's in fact probably bad capacitors, which is a really common issue for electronics of that era. I also encountered that several times, it's a quick fix if you know how to solder new ones, and you can find such capacitors for cheap (like 1$ cheap last time I had to look, though finding that price for a single one is hard, and much less when bought in bulk).
- li2uR3ce 4y ago
  > Is this some kind of a trend that I'm not up to date with? It's called planned obsolescence and it's part of the factory-to-landfill pipeline. It's not exactly new. Do we know how to make a long lasting laptop fan? Yes. Would nearly every consumer pay $0.25 more for a laptop with a longer lasting fan? Yes. Can you buy laptops with high quality fans? Yes, but seemingly only by dumb luck. By the time you figure out that a product has a high failure part the company will no longer be manufacturing it and therefore reviews won't be relevant (granting relative immunity to bad reviews). And when every brand is doing it, there's no way for "free market" competition to sort it out. It's a race to the bottom. (3. 2. 1. Cue "The morality of protecting share holders eclipses the morality of ripping consumers off.") I only buy used laptops now. The significant reduction in price is a reduction in risk. Also a used product has had "burn in" time to weed out the lemons. The engineer calculated xx% of fail-early laptops often aren't the ones being resold. I'm bitter. I'm cynical. Despite being aware of my mind's ability to find patterns to confirm my biases... I'm really struggling to be excited about new products. I'm spent like nuclear fuel; I'm toxic. They say knowing is half the battle... not in psychology. Doesn't help me a damned bit. Today's sponsor is Better Help. I should just stop now.
Communitivity 4y ago
I wonder if there could be another issue. I remember we had a hardware guy once where I worked who took apart a broken cable modem prototype, found that one of the traces was thinly broken. Traces are the lines on a printed circuit board, Vias the circles. He used an emory cloth to strip the protective green coating, then a small narrow heat gun to melt the trace slightly and bring it together. If OP had a broken trace in there, then heat might have fixed it. Then again, OP's reasoning is probably better as I am not a hardware guy.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Those traces under the green solder mask are copper (melting point ~1000°C/2000°F). He may have added solder to fix the trace, but he didn’t melt the trace itself.
  - Communitivity 4y ago
    Thank you for explaining that, as you can tell I don't work with PCBs myself, and this was back in 2000.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
This would seem to be significantly more clever than my open handed slap method.
- mrexroad 4y ago
  “Percussive maintenance”
femto 4y ago
I'm guessing the real cause is an aged electrolytic capacitor. The electrolyte can dry out over time causing a change in capacitance. Power supplies are the most common failure in electronics and electrolytic capacitors are a common reason for power supply failure. There are electrolytic capacitors near where he was heating, and the capacitance of electrolytics can have a strong temperature dependence. He probably managed to heat one of the electrolytic capacitors, which happened to change its capacitance in the correct direction to make the circuit work. Chances are the monitor would work reliably if all the electrolytic capacitors were replaced. Edit: I'm guessing the problem is C208. Section 10 of the LDO data sheet, linked in the article, talks about how stability is dependent on the output capacitor (C208). C208 has probably dried out, reducing its capacitance and making the LDO unstable. Heating was enough to make the circuit stable (for a while). Further edit: Predating my comment, "Gordonjcp" also called out C208.
- pierrebai 4y ago
  I had a computer that could only be booted with a hair dryer. I did not disassemble any parts, so I never got to know which exact part was failing, but a good 5-10 minutes of pre-heating with the dryer allowed it to boot.
  - qohen 4y ago
    A few years ago, my neighbor's PC wouldn't boot. Unlike similar situations I'd had with my own hardware, the power-supply wasn't dead -- in fact, at the back, there was a green blinking light. I went online and found people suggesting that, in such a case, blowing a hair-dryer at the power-supply might fix things. I tried it and...sure enough, the PC then booted. More examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=power+supply+blinking+light+hair+dryer https://www.google.com/search?q=power+supply+blinking+light+...
  - cookie_monsta 4y ago
    Cool (or hot, as the case may be). Can I ask how you stumbled upon this solution? It's not one I would immediately reach for, especially the 5 - 10 minutes bit.
- 4y ago
rosshaugh 4y ago
I used to throw the graphics card from my Dell XPS 1710 into the oven whenever it stopped working. That worked about 10 times over the space of a few years!
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  That’s really interesting—had no idea that was a thing. Did you ever worry about putting food in the same oven?
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  I did this with a 2012 MBP at one point. It was basically a crude attempt at reflowing the solder on the board. Got it running again, and I managed another ~year out of it, before my then-two-year old daughter poured a pint of milk into the keyboard.
jwilk 4y ago
Archived copy that can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.today/eAmar https://archive.today/eAmar
prawn 4y ago
When visiting China as a teenager in the early 90s, my brother and I decided to invest our hard-saved cash in a Micro Genius. This was a rip-off of a Super Famicom which I'd seen a Malaysian school friend play back home in Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Genius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Genius There's a photo of us smiling at the counter of a department store, handing over money. We bought a couple of multi-game cartridges. 190-in-1 and 27-in-1 or something. We tested it in a Hong Kong hotel room, and briefly played a few games. Then imagine our dismay when we eventually got back to Australia and the thing wouldn't reliably load a game. We were blowing on cartridges and all that. One day, we gave it a shot up in our non-A/C, second-storey bedroom. It was a 40 deg C day, so absolutely cooking upstairs. The console worked! The games loaded! We got to play an assorted of games we'd been eagerly waiting on. We eventually decided it must be the heat and on the next day I can remember us taking it in turns with a hairdryer trying to warm the console or cartridge to get a game to start while the other person played. It might let us play for several minutes and then fail. Unfortunately, this trick didn't last for long and then the console was surpassed and the games no longer kept our interest. 30 years later, I still have the useless boxed console in my garage and can't bear to throw it out.
- pvillano 4y ago
  replace the electrolytic capacitors and it'll work like new
  - prawn 4y ago
    Problem is, even as new, it's still the worst of about a dozen consoles or devices in the house capable of letting my kids play video games. They play PS4 or the 360, and occasionally an original Xbox for a particular party game. There are older consoles than those that get completely ignored but would be superior to the Micro Genius! But you reminded me that we did take it to an electronics store for a quote to try and fix it, and I think the quote was more than we paid for it. Also a bit pointless with the pace new consoles were being released!
- rocky1138 4y ago
  This is a really cute story. It might be really nice to fix it up and play it with your brother at Christmas (or other similar holiday) as a bonding fun time.
causality0 4y ago
Hair dryers can be quite useful. If you have a small engine that won't start like a lawnmower, heating it with a hair dryer will often allow it to crank.
hammock 4y ago
There used to be a thing where you bake motherboards in the oven to fix them
amtamt 4y ago
Beware, hair dryers can also cause a failed rocket launch. https://metro.co.uk/2010/09/06/hairdryer-malfunction-leads-to-failed-launch-of-heat-1xtycho-brahe-507750/ https://metro.co.uk/2010/09/06/hairdryer-malfunction-leads-t...
favadi 4y ago
I fixed mine with duck tape: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLIl30yVcAQcKw2?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLIl30yVcAQcKw2?format=jpg&name=....
1970-01-01 4y ago
A shout-out to badcaps.net is warranted here. They have been a hidden gem for 2 decades. https://badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1002389&postcount=7 https://badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1002389&postcount=7
enqk 4y ago
The Apple Cube G4 power brick could also be resurrected for some time using an hair dryer.
mmastrac 4y ago
I fixed a 2008 macbook with a GPU issue (wouldn't boot past BIOS) by turning it on and letting it run full-tilt under a blanket. Eventually it just resoldered itself.
- rasz 4y ago
  It didnt. 8600M had a design defect in microbumps connecting die to package. Thermal cycling in high heat scenarios (Apple is famous fo cooking components at the margin of T-junction) softened improperly selected underfill and broke microbumps connecting die to package. Repeated heating up can again soften it to release stresses and temporarily reconnected broken traces. It never fixes the main issue of broken chip. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2011837#Problems https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2011837#Problems https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understands-bumpgate/ https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan... >On July 2, 2009, the date being ironically a year after the notorious 8-K that publicly kicked off bumpgate, the company put up a job listing for a “DIRECTOR OF PACKAGE TECHNOLOGY”. https://notebooks.com/2008/10/10/apple-to-replace-faulty-nvidia-gpus-in-macbook-pros/ https://notebooks.com/2008/10/10/apple-to-replace-faulty-nvi...
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    Interesting. It "fixed it" for about ~5-6 years of occasional use going forward, at least. Perhaps it was a different component than the GPU.
justusthane 4y ago
This observation isn't directly applicable to this story in particular, as this case the fix did require some in depth troubleshooting knowledge of the subject. That being said, I'm often struck by how often something can be fixed by just opening it up and looking at it, even if you know next to nothing about the internals. Two examples, both car-related: - I used to drive an old Ford Ranger, and one day it started running like crap. Horrible acceleration, engine running rough. I made an appointment with a mechanic, but the day before my appointment I thought "What the heck, I might as well look at it." I popped the hood and immediately noticed that the air filter housing was cracked in half. Patched it up with duct tape, and it was good as "new". - One of my wheels started making a godawful constant squealing. I couldn't drive 10 yards without turning heads. I brought it into the mechanic, where they took the wheel off and promptly a pebble fell out of the brake calipers. Had I just jacked it up and taken the wheel off myself, I would have saved a trip to the mechanic.
rasz 4y ago
A lot of theory and weird explanations (weird for an EE), but no verification like actually measuring VEN. hair dryer = dried capacitors, not LDO. Heating up temporarily rejuvenates dead caps.
xcambar 4y ago
Is it okay if what I liked the most in your article is your table full or stickers?
Knufferlbert 4y ago
Reminds me of the "myth" of putting a Radeon GPU into the oven on low heat for a while if it was broken. I tried it when mine stopped working and indeed it fixed it. Also another Radeon card was identical as a more powerful one, except that two pins (maybe wrong word) were not connected. I drew the connection using a pencil directly on the board and it worked as well, saving around 100 Euros. It's over a decade ago, so details may be slightly wrong. But still interesting how low tech solutions worked on such complicated machinery.
- logbiscuitswave 4y ago
  What you did was reflow the solder. This isn’t an uncommon technique for amateur/small batch repairs or assembly of surface mount circuit boards. At the maker space I use, there’s a toaster oven dedicated to this task. That being said, you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process. ETA this reminds me of the Xbox 360 “red ring of death” fiasco. One DIY repair technique was to wrap the entire Xbox in towels blocking all the ventilation. The theory was the resulting overheating would reflow the failing BGA solder joints. I don’t know if this really worked or was anecdotal but it was one I remember seeing a lot.
  - ars 4y ago
    > you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process. Just run the oven at full heat for an hour and you are fine - the same process that off-gassed the chemicals in the first place, will also deplete them from the oven when you run it later. (Keep the vent on, or ventilate the kitchen.)
    - a1369209993 4y ago
      You can also stick a fume sucker[0] in the (cold) oven for a hour. But with either approach, make sure nothing dripped and landed on the bottom of the oven chamber (or worse, the corner seams or the space under the chamber), since that can stick around and keep outgassing for months or years. 0: A length of dryer hose with a salvaged PC cooling fan on one end and the other out a window - usually used to ventilate solder fumes.
barbazoo 4y ago
I love the last picture with their desk covered in stickers. I thought we were supposed to keep the stickers in a box forever until we find the "perfect" use for them...

291 points by nor0x 4y ago

Kinda reminded me of the time I used listerine on my MacBook screen and it solved the gross reflective coating issue that apple wouldn’t fix for me. Crazy part is it worked Context: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/gho3s4/my_macbook_pro_before_and_after_i_used_listerine/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/gho3s4/m...

bayindirh 4y ago

I had a similar problem with some small exotic parts on my Hyundai L90D+. After being able to source them, I replaced the parts, and my monitor came back to life, briefly. After 30 minutes or so, another part of the board has fried, so I just replaced the monitor, quite sadly.

rompic 4y ago

Had a similar issue with an old samsung synchmaster. The capacitors were the problem. There are a lot of similar 10 year old reports on the net. E.g.: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24494&highlight=AL2416 https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24494&highlig...

rompic 4y ago
https://badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69534 https://badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=69534 says it's most likely the regulator on this screen
jarenmf 4y ago
Bad caps was a very common problem in the old days, I remember I replaced the ones on my motherboard at least twice. The classical symptom was that heating the motherboard will allow the PC to start.
- rompic 4y ago
  Yes,"Capacitor plague" it was called. There's an interesting story about espionage and incomplete stolen formula in the wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

howard941 4y ago

Reminds me of temporarily recovering 5.25" IDE drives by freezing them overnight

emkoemko 4y ago

i wonder if this would help my issue, my 165hz monitor is not usable anymore at 165hz it flickers, has weird grainy image and what looks like scan lines. Had to use it at 144hz for a while as it didn't happen there but after some time i had to go to 120hz and now 120hz is starting to degrade also : (

abofh 4y ago

I feel like this is that story about the factory... 1$ - Blowing a hairdryer at the monitor 9,999$ - Knowing where to point the hair dryer...

mdrzn 4y ago
lol definitely. I would have no idea where to start to find that fix, or even where to find the schematics!

unwind 4y ago

The core analysis seems to be: > A common issue with these types of components is that the quiescent current which ensures for the internal circuitry to work properly depends on the ambient temperature. If it’s too low and the regular doesn’t have enough supply current left the output appears to be dead. Which honestly makes very little sense to me, and also reads a bit like a terminology tombola. A quick googling did not turn up more material on the idea that voltage regulators depend on the temperature like that, and it would be surprising (generally electronics performs better when cooled). I would expect the problem to be due to a bad solder joint, which would explain why heating it helps since it might make the solder flow a little bit back into making connection (although hair dryer temperatures at 200°F/93°C) are too low to properly reflow solder). Or it might just make components and/or solder expand enough to make contact (which is kind of the same thing but different). All real hardware experts, please explain. :)

pie314isi 4y ago
I agree, it makes no sense. I am a real hardware electronics engineer and I don't understand his explanation. I believe the LDO could fail in a temperature dependent way. I do not believe the explanation.
- madengr 4y ago
jonsen 4y ago
> ...a bad solder joint Or inside the IC a bad bonding between the chip and the package leads. Or IC package developed cracks and moisture creeps in.
laci37 4y ago
I am not an expert, just a hobbyist. It's hard to tell anything without measurements. Either the regulators are half dead (factory spec for operating temperature is -40 to +85 C°) and should be replaced, or thermal expansion causes a cracked solder joint to touch again, or some other component is half dead and needs a bit of warmth to work properly.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gijsnijholt1980 4y ago

Can confirm that this saved our old Samsung lcd television. It took longer and longer to turn on. Some guy on YouTube used this hair dryer trick. So I did just that, blow the air inside the TV from below through the panels, and like magic it works again. Life hack! Curious why it works though

richardfey 4y ago

I feel like I missed out on the 3D hype and I am a bit nostalgic now

devwastaken 4y ago
Better done with VR headsets. Few games supported monitor VR, and they didn't do that great of a job.
- cestith 4y ago
  Active LCD shutter glasses for 3D movies were much nicer than 3D gaming that way. Sadly, so little content came out for those setups that the fad passed.

f311a 4y ago

My old Benq monitor was blinking for the fist 10-20 minutes when I turn it on and I used similar trick. I knew nothing about electronics and used common sense. I would direct hair dryer towards air vents of the monitor and wait for 30 seconds. I got bored after a month repeating the same thing every day and sold it unrepaired.

adav 4y ago

Sandwich one of those silly cheapo USB mug warmers into the case. Plug it in briefly for a little warmth just to get it going. Like a choke on an old-fashioned car!

tomxor 4y ago
Certainly satisfies the quirkiness factor :) Extra points if you can squeeze in linear actuator for an actual choke switch. Also good to think of alternative fixes like this when it's difficult to source replacement components.
Spooky23 4y ago
Proceed with caution. Not to be a worry wart, but a long time ago we got a batch of monitors with a defective board. A capacitor overheated, melted some sort of glue on an adjacent component, which in turn dripped on a power supply component, shorted out and started a fire. A couple of days later, it happened again… and we ended up getting all hands on deck to find those monitors.
- jonsen 4y ago
  That would probably be electrolyte leaking. There are several reports/stories about bad quality capacitors unintentionally used in production.

Tade0 4y ago

I would never guess that a piece of even consumer hardware was designed with such low tolerances as to develop such issues. Is this some kind of a trend that I'm not up to date with? I was surprised to find out that my laptop fans started first getting noisy and then rattling after less than two years since purchase. I searched around and apparently the tight tolerances combined with low quality of the bearings eventually produce this effect. This is especially audible if I let them heat up - it appears that thermal expansion is enough for the blades to get too close to the housing. I ordered a set of new ones and appropriate tools, but I can't imagine doing this every two years. My previous laptop lasted around seven, after which both the battery and the power socket gave out.

slig 4y ago
Isn't that just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence ?
ungamedplayer 4y ago
If this is the case, you could consider bearingless fans, which should prevent them from wearing out. The only issue is you may not be able to find them in the size requirement you need. Good luck !
Fradow 4y ago
He's talking about a 12 years-old screen that probably saw daily use. Something failing at that point is more than expected. As others have noted, it's in fact probably bad capacitors, which is a really common issue for electronics of that era. I also encountered that several times, it's a quick fix if you know how to solder new ones, and you can find such capacitors for cheap (like 1$ cheap last time I had to look, though finding that price for a single one is hard, and much less when bought in bulk).
li2uR3ce 4y ago
> Is this some kind of a trend that I'm not up to date with? It's called planned obsolescence and it's part of the factory-to-landfill pipeline. It's not exactly new. Do we know how to make a long lasting laptop fan? Yes. Would nearly every consumer pay $0.25 more for a laptop with a longer lasting fan? Yes. Can you buy laptops with high quality fans? Yes, but seemingly only by dumb luck. By the time you figure out that a product has a high failure part the company will no longer be manufacturing it and therefore reviews won't be relevant (granting relative immunity to bad reviews). And when every brand is doing it, there's no way for "free market" competition to sort it out. It's a race to the bottom. (3. 2. 1. Cue "The morality of protecting share holders eclipses the morality of ripping consumers off.") I only buy used laptops now. The significant reduction in price is a reduction in risk. Also a used product has had "burn in" time to weed out the lemons. The engineer calculated xx% of fail-early laptops often aren't the ones being resold. I'm bitter. I'm cynical. Despite being aware of my mind's ability to find patterns to confirm my biases... I'm really struggling to be excited about new products. I'm spent like nuclear fuel; I'm toxic. They say knowing is half the battle... not in psychology. Doesn't help me a damned bit. Today's sponsor is Better Help. I should just stop now.

Communitivity 4y ago

I wonder if there could be another issue. I remember we had a hardware guy once where I worked who took apart a broken cable modem prototype, found that one of the traces was thinly broken. Traces are the lines on a printed circuit board, Vias the circles. He used an emory cloth to strip the protective green coating, then a small narrow heat gun to melt the trace slightly and bring it together. If OP had a broken trace in there, then heat might have fixed it. Then again, OP's reasoning is probably better as I am not a hardware guy.

sokoloff 4y ago
Those traces under the green solder mask are copper (melting point ~1000°C/2000°F). He may have added solder to fix the trace, but he didn’t melt the trace itself.
- Communitivity 4y ago
  Thank you for explaining that, as you can tell I don't work with PCBs myself, and this was back in 2000.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

This would seem to be significantly more clever than my open handed slap method.

mrexroad 4y ago
“Percussive maintenance”

femto 4y ago

I'm guessing the real cause is an aged electrolytic capacitor. The electrolyte can dry out over time causing a change in capacitance. Power supplies are the most common failure in electronics and electrolytic capacitors are a common reason for power supply failure. There are electrolytic capacitors near where he was heating, and the capacitance of electrolytics can have a strong temperature dependence. He probably managed to heat one of the electrolytic capacitors, which happened to change its capacitance in the correct direction to make the circuit work. Chances are the monitor would work reliably if all the electrolytic capacitors were replaced. Edit: I'm guessing the problem is C208. Section 10 of the LDO data sheet, linked in the article, talks about how stability is dependent on the output capacitor (C208). C208 has probably dried out, reducing its capacitance and making the LDO unstable. Heating was enough to make the circuit stable (for a while). Further edit: Predating my comment, "Gordonjcp" also called out C208.

pierrebai 4y ago
I had a computer that could only be booted with a hair dryer. I did not disassemble any parts, so I never got to know which exact part was failing, but a good 5-10 minutes of pre-heating with the dryer allowed it to boot.
- qohen 4y ago
  A few years ago, my neighbor's PC wouldn't boot. Unlike similar situations I'd had with my own hardware, the power-supply wasn't dead -- in fact, at the back, there was a green blinking light. I went online and found people suggesting that, in such a case, blowing a hair-dryer at the power-supply might fix things. I tried it and...sure enough, the PC then booted. More examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=power+supply+blinking+light+hair+dryer https://www.google.com/search?q=power+supply+blinking+light+...
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  Cool (or hot, as the case may be). Can I ask how you stumbled upon this solution? It's not one I would immediately reach for, especially the 5 - 10 minutes bit.
4y ago

rosshaugh 4y ago

I used to throw the graphics card from my Dell XPS 1710 into the oven whenever it stopped working. That worked about 10 times over the space of a few years!

jlund-molfese 4y ago
That’s really interesting—had no idea that was a thing. Did you ever worry about putting food in the same oven?
Ancapistani 4y ago
I did this with a 2012 MBP at one point. It was basically a crude attempt at reflowing the solder on the board. Got it running again, and I managed another ~year out of it, before my then-two-year old daughter poured a pint of milk into the keyboard.

jwilk 4y ago

Archived copy that can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.today/eAmar https://archive.today/eAmar

prawn 4y ago

When visiting China as a teenager in the early 90s, my brother and I decided to invest our hard-saved cash in a Micro Genius. This was a rip-off of a Super Famicom which I'd seen a Malaysian school friend play back home in Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Genius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Genius There's a photo of us smiling at the counter of a department store, handing over money. We bought a couple of multi-game cartridges. 190-in-1 and 27-in-1 or something. We tested it in a Hong Kong hotel room, and briefly played a few games. Then imagine our dismay when we eventually got back to Australia and the thing wouldn't reliably load a game. We were blowing on cartridges and all that. One day, we gave it a shot up in our non-A/C, second-storey bedroom. It was a 40 deg C day, so absolutely cooking upstairs. The console worked! The games loaded! We got to play an assorted of games we'd been eagerly waiting on. We eventually decided it must be the heat and on the next day I can remember us taking it in turns with a hairdryer trying to warm the console or cartridge to get a game to start while the other person played. It might let us play for several minutes and then fail. Unfortunately, this trick didn't last for long and then the console was surpassed and the games no longer kept our interest. 30 years later, I still have the useless boxed console in my garage and can't bear to throw it out.

pvillano 4y ago
replace the electrolytic capacitors and it'll work like new
- prawn 4y ago
  Problem is, even as new, it's still the worst of about a dozen consoles or devices in the house capable of letting my kids play video games. They play PS4 or the 360, and occasionally an original Xbox for a particular party game. There are older consoles than those that get completely ignored but would be superior to the Micro Genius! But you reminded me that we did take it to an electronics store for a quote to try and fix it, and I think the quote was more than we paid for it. Also a bit pointless with the pace new consoles were being released!
rocky1138 4y ago
This is a really cute story. It might be really nice to fix it up and play it with your brother at Christmas (or other similar holiday) as a bonding fun time.

causality0 4y ago

Hair dryers can be quite useful. If you have a small engine that won't start like a lawnmower, heating it with a hair dryer will often allow it to crank.

hammock 4y ago

There used to be a thing where you bake motherboards in the oven to fix them

amtamt 4y ago

Beware, hair dryers can also cause a failed rocket launch. https://metro.co.uk/2010/09/06/hairdryer-malfunction-leads-to-failed-launch-of-heat-1xtycho-brahe-507750/ https://metro.co.uk/2010/09/06/hairdryer-malfunction-leads-t...

favadi 4y ago

I fixed mine with duck tape: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLIl30yVcAQcKw2?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLIl30yVcAQcKw2?format=jpg&name=....

1970-01-01 4y ago

A shout-out to badcaps.net is warranted here. They have been a hidden gem for 2 decades. https://badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1002389&postcount=7 https://badcaps.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1002389&postcount=7

enqk 4y ago

The Apple Cube G4 power brick could also be resurrected for some time using an hair dryer.

mmastrac 4y ago

I fixed a 2008 macbook with a GPU issue (wouldn't boot past BIOS) by turning it on and letting it run full-tilt under a blanket. Eventually it just resoldered itself.

rasz 4y ago
It didnt. 8600M had a design defect in microbumps connecting die to package. Thermal cycling in high heat scenarios (Apple is famous fo cooking components at the margin of T-junction) softened improperly selected underfill and broke microbumps connecting die to package. Repeated heating up can again soften it to release stresses and temporarily reconnected broken traces. It never fixes the main issue of broken chip. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2011837#Problems https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2011837#Problems https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understands-bumpgate/ https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan... >On July 2, 2009, the date being ironically a year after the notorious 8-K that publicly kicked off bumpgate, the company put up a job listing for a “DIRECTOR OF PACKAGE TECHNOLOGY”. https://notebooks.com/2008/10/10/apple-to-replace-faulty-nvidia-gpus-in-macbook-pros/ https://notebooks.com/2008/10/10/apple-to-replace-faulty-nvi...
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Interesting. It "fixed it" for about ~5-6 years of occasional use going forward, at least. Perhaps it was a different component than the GPU.

justusthane 4y ago

This observation isn't directly applicable to this story in particular, as this case the fix did require some in depth troubleshooting knowledge of the subject. That being said, I'm often struck by how often something can be fixed by just opening it up and looking at it, even if you know next to nothing about the internals. Two examples, both car-related: - I used to drive an old Ford Ranger, and one day it started running like crap. Horrible acceleration, engine running rough. I made an appointment with a mechanic, but the day before my appointment I thought "What the heck, I might as well look at it." I popped the hood and immediately noticed that the air filter housing was cracked in half. Patched it up with duct tape, and it was good as "new". - One of my wheels started making a godawful constant squealing. I couldn't drive 10 yards without turning heads. I brought it into the mechanic, where they took the wheel off and promptly a pebble fell out of the brake calipers. Had I just jacked it up and taken the wheel off myself, I would have saved a trip to the mechanic.

rasz 4y ago

A lot of theory and weird explanations (weird for an EE), but no verification like actually measuring VEN. hair dryer = dried capacitors, not LDO. Heating up temporarily rejuvenates dead caps.

xcambar 4y ago

Is it okay if what I liked the most in your article is your table full or stickers?

Knufferlbert 4y ago

Reminds me of the "myth" of putting a Radeon GPU into the oven on low heat for a while if it was broken. I tried it when mine stopped working and indeed it fixed it. Also another Radeon card was identical as a more powerful one, except that two pins (maybe wrong word) were not connected. I drew the connection using a pencil directly on the board and it worked as well, saving around 100 Euros. It's over a decade ago, so details may be slightly wrong. But still interesting how low tech solutions worked on such complicated machinery.

logbiscuitswave 4y ago
What you did was reflow the solder. This isn’t an uncommon technique for amateur/small batch repairs or assembly of surface mount circuit boards. At the maker space I use, there’s a toaster oven dedicated to this task. That being said, you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process. ETA this reminds me of the Xbox 360 “red ring of death” fiasco. One DIY repair technique was to wrap the entire Xbox in towels blocking all the ventilation. The theory was the resulting overheating would reflow the failing BGA solder joints. I don’t know if this really worked or was anecdotal but it was one I remember seeing a lot.
- ars 4y ago
  > you don’t want to use that oven for food purposes anymore. Lots of toxic chemicals will off-gas in the reflow process. Just run the oven at full heat for an hour and you are fine - the same process that off-gassed the chemicals in the first place, will also deplete them from the oven when you run it later. (Keep the vent on, or ventilate the kitchen.)
  - a1369209993 4y ago
    You can also stick a fume sucker[0] in the (cold) oven for a hour. But with either approach, make sure nothing dripped and landed on the bottom of the oven chamber (or worse, the corner seams or the space under the chamber), since that can stick around and keep outgassing for months or years. 0: A length of dryer hose with a salvaged PC cooling fan on one end and the other out a window - usually used to ventilate solder fumes.

barbazoo 4y ago

I love the last picture with their desk covered in stickers. I thought we were supposed to keep the stickers in a box forever until we find the "perfect" use for them...