[dlinder]

You sound like a kindred spirit. I have put hard drives in freezers to release stiction; I have baked motherboards in the oven to re-flow questionable solder. I wonder if anything in our kitchen is sacred! Sometimes I wish I had "MacGyvering goofy tech junk" as a full time job!

[mdip]

No doubt! Yup, I've done the oven thing, too (several PS3 motherboards as well -- used to buy 'em broken on Craigslist when there was a chance they'd be running older firmware and resell them).

Trick with the freezer hard drive: if you ever order perishable items over the internet, they sometimes ship in boxes with large bags of "blue goo". Pop those in the fridge and the next time you need to keep a drive spinning long enough to get one last copy out of it, sandwich it between two of those. They don't get cold enough to pick up condensation and short the drive and the blue goo keeps cool for a long time if the bags are large enough.

[smoyer]

My father-in-law started calling me MacGyver in the late '80s when I repaired his CB radio using a ball-point pen and modeling cement ... The name stuck.