Sunday, January 10, 2010

How cold does it have to get to freeze your laptop

Rarely comes to play in South Florida, but after the cold this week, and some people who had some problems with hard drives, just wondering...
How cold is too cold to keep your laptop in your car?

11 comments:

  1. think the lcd dies first.

    http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_fam.pdf

    seagate says 0c for operation enviroment

    i left my laptop here by mistake yesterday in my car at -5c over night , waited about a hour before i powered it up though

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  2. I've left mine in the car overnight in subfreezing weather many times. Let it warm up a few minute and you're good to go. Might be an issue in very humid conditions.

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  3. Right, normal procedure would be to wait for room temperature and hope no moisture was frozen inside.
    I suggested their screens might be bad, not their HD. But we never get this type of weather and non-IT people never think about it.
    But if 0 is the magic number, hardware repair people will do good business down here for a bit.

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  4. -But if 0 is the magic number, hardware repair people will do good business down here for a bit.

    thats operating temp , non operating is -40 i think

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  6. All I know is down here no one knows what to do in the cold.
    Normally we have a day or 2 maybe 3 of cold weather, and not since 1989 and 1977 has it been this cold for this long.
    It's so cold the iguanas are falling out of the trees...dead.
    For once I am thankful for my laptop being a bit warmer where my hands rest. My netbook though doesn't get as hot.

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  7. Craig, no amount of beer will bring that post back. It was my free thinking, without thinking, and luckily friends pointed that out to me. Sorry, nothing more here.

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  9. A good tip for warming cold equipment to avoid the humidity issue is to seal it in a trash bag or similar and squeeze the air out before you close it. Do this outside where the air is dry. Bring it in, wait 10-15 minuets. When the equipment is not obviously cold to the touch, you're safe to open the bag and power it up. This knowledge came to me when doing winter video shoots with $20k cameras. You don't want to screw one of those up bringing it in cold to wet air where condensation happens immediately.

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  10. JE, Wow, What a great tip! Makes sense too.

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