I want to share my own experience with baking, but for those too busy to read it all: Baking done right doesn’t really break nor fix your machine, it just gives it a short respite before its eventual failure.
in Nov 2014 my 4-year-old 17" macbook pro had video freezing problems that had gotten worse over the past 6 months. I’d tried everything until I learned that this is a physical problem. I dropped the motherboard into the oven for 7.5 minutes at 375 degrees (my oven had a good sensor to make sure the degrees were accurate) and the baking seemed to have reduced the crashing problem. The fix only lasted about 10 days, after which it started failing rarely, and then more frequently until by Jan 4, I decided to bake it again. This time I used a monitor and baked it at 375 degrees for 8 minutes. This fix was problem-free for 10 days after which problems slowly returned till April when I baked it again. In May I baked it again. If I wasn’t such a starving student dependent on my portable machine, I might have just gotten something else, but poverty sucks. The point is that the bakes (when done right and within time limits) do not fix the machine, but they do bring it back from the dead for a brief while so you can finish the work you need to do. Nobody should have to do this, but sometimes life isn’t ideal. I share this not to encourage this, but to show those rare folks who might find themselves in a similarly desperate situation: it might help temporarily. What I recommend is like I did: go look up some information on how it’s done and the risks. As is the case in repairs, all breakdowns are different, so baking may not work in many cases simply because of the nature of the break.
2 Likes
