How cold weather shorts out your laptop
Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky
Well, it’s winter time here in Chicago, so I figured I’d post this little reminder:
Keep your electronics out of the cold.
When you leave your electronics in your car overnight, or anywhere else cold for that matter, they get cold. You know this already.
When you use your electronics, they get warm. You know this also, so I don’t need to explain it.
What you might not realize is that parts of your electronics warm up at different rates. Some get very warm almost instantly. Some can take as much as 15+ minutes to warm up. When you have a temperature difference like this, you can get condensation inside of your electronics.
You’ve seen condensation before. It’s those drops of water that form on a cold can of, er, beverage on a hot day. You don’t want water to form inside of your stuff.
So what is it’s too late, and you’re reading this on a freezing cold laptop you just fetched out of your car? Shut down now, wait until the laptop is at least close to room temperature, and give it an extra hour to make sure there’s no mini droplets inside your machine.
As a side note, you can clean a keyboard by putting it through the dishwasher. Just don’t use the dry part of the cycle, it’ll melt. And give it a very long time to dry before using it. Whether or not you want that plaque in the same place as your dishes is a different story. I don’t…
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February 8, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I left my laptop in the car today and the temperature is about 28F. It was about 18F when I locked up the car this morning. When I drive home tonight, I will have about an hour commute. Will the gradual warming of the car’s interior also warm the laptop enough to use when I get home?
Also, I heard that you should actually leave the laptop running but asleep, if you have to leave it in a cold car during the day or overnight. It generates a small amount of warmth this way.
February 8, 2007 at 8:47 pm
not sure. I’m pretty sure it’s the rate of heating/cooling that will get you. In the summertime, this rate is instantaneous on the surface of a cold object.
In a case like this, I would take the laptop out of any kind of bag so it’s not insulated from the warmth and open it up to increase the amount of square area exposed to the air. I’ve left mine standing on its side with the screen open before.
You could leave the thing on, but if the battery goes dead during the day ther’s probably no point in doing so. I’d also be nervous about having a large temperature differential between components inside the laptop.
Best bet is probably to bring it into work with you. If it doesn’t need to go to work, might as well leave it at home, I guess!
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