[genewitch]

during the PPC 603 era of Macintosh Performa series, we had a bad motherboard, and apple sent an engineer to our house to replace it. This is around the time that the story of apple sending engineers to houses to remove motherboards, raise them 2 feet above a flat surface, and drop them was being passed around. Something about reseating chips that one of their pick and place machines was misaligned on or something.

[djmips]

When I worked my first job in retail in the mid eighties - we were selling Atari ST and there was an official Atari bulletin to do exactly that. It would reseat the socketed chips.

[genewitch]

interesting; i doubt my memory is that faulty, so it's possible the story went through some iterations, making it an apocryphal story about apple, instead. Or, possibly, the major pick and place manufacturer had a slew of alignment issues in the 80s!

[mrguyorama]

I thought the apple "lift and drop the computer" story was about the Apple 3. It had no vents, so it was always overheating and "unseating chips" like the Xbox 360 heat issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws

And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they cooked themselves even more, or they put the mobo in the oven on a low temperature. That fix was also 100% used for fixing certain graphics cards unseating in the mid 2000s as well.

[K7PJP]

I've got an HP Laser Printer from about 15 years or so. About once a year, the printer stops responding and I have to remove the board, put it in the oven for 10 minutes or so to revive it.

[Paul-Craft]

What even is the theory on how that could possibly work? I believe you, it's just that I don't have any mental model of how baking a circuit board makes it work right for a year, and how it keeps working to fix the issue.

[brabarossa]

The theory is that 'baking" it could reflow a bad solder joint and fix it. A popular fix of last resort.

[genewitch]

I've reflowed a GPU in an oven before, personally. with 5 little balls of aluminum foil as standoffs and monitoring the temp closely. It fixed it. I probably still have that - working - card somewhere.

[astrange]

Those might be field engineers, but I have heard of the WiFi teams at computer companies going out to people's houses to test especially weird situations.