I jus happened to be looking at some of my old posts and saw this thread. Figured I’d update.


Anyway, 15 months later and my 2011 27” iMac is still trucking along. She’s almost 7 1/2 years old now and gets heavy use, daily. I still can’t believe baking the graphics card in the oven fixed it.

I’m serious when I say this thing runs like the day I bought it.

And now that I posted I just know it’s gonna die again next week.

Thanks for the update. Mine still trucking too.

I’d love to hear a tech explanation of why baking it fixes the problem.

Or maybe baking it does nothing and it is just disconnecting/reconnecting that resolves a compromised or corroded connector/connection ?????

quote:

Or maybe baking it does nothing and it is just disconnecting/reconnecting that resolves a compromised or corroded connector/connection ?????

This is my first guess, but I ain’t no com-puter genius...

Baking reflows bad epoxy solder

quote:

Originally posted by 911Boss:
I’d love to hear a tech explanation of why baking it fixes the problem.

Or maybe baking it does nothing and it is just disconnecting/reconnecting that resolves a compromised or corroded connector/connection ?????

Explanation is in the last post at the bottom of page 2.

This is good to hear, after 15 months.
My 2009 24" iMac is still trucking along. A new SSD and some additional RAM was added this year.
Still smoking fast, and does what I need.

I have a 2007 core2duo popped by lightning
I'll eventually fix it

Good on you for salvaging it and not sending to the dump prematurely. I saved an old iMac by putting in a new HD. 10 years later it still works pretty good and now my neighbor uses it. I had a spare drive just laying around.

Recently my Lenovo W530 I bought about 6 years ago needed some minor work. The keyboard needed repair and the old HD was reallly slow. Added a 250gb ssd and a new keyboard panel for $100 combined. 4 screws!!! Some might say it's 6 years old. It is...but with an i7 and a workstation graphics card. My 2018 i5 ITX build is actually slower performance. But it was also half the price.

Generally speaking, you get what you pay for....computer and components are very linear in price vs performance. If you always buy a bottom-of-barrel computer or the lowest specs relative to what you need, the computer will no doubt have a shorter shelf life. If you get a computer with a modern architecture and components you should expect it to be usable for a longer period of time. Of course, there's exceptions...like users who have needs for cutting-edge technology.

quote:

Originally posted by VictimNoMore:
This is good to hear, after 15 months.
My 2009 24" iMac is still trucking along. A new SSD and some additional RAM was added this year.
Still smoking fast, and does what I need.

It's pretty great!

I've been strictly Apple since 2009 and it was a great move indeed.

 
I have heard of (and had experience with) refrigerating an unresponsive hard disk. Sometimes you can revive it long enough to get the data off of it. Never heard of baking a video card, though.