[pkolaczk]

Putting electronics in a fridge may work sometimes, but it may also cause irreversible damage if you're unlucky. The biggest threat to electronics is not just temperature but also moisture. Cooling the air captured inside a laptop may cause water to condense on electronic components and may cause subsequent short circuits, which may burn something irreversibly once powered on. Whether it happens depends on the relative humidity of the air you start with and the temperature delta. In dry areas this may be ok, but really don't try that method in tropics (or even in Europe in Summer - I can see condensation happening almost all the time in my fridge).

[mnw21cam]

The air inside a fridge is really dry, simply because it is cold, but also because the heat exchanger inside has to be even colder in order to keep the fridge cold, and so all the condensation occurs on that. If you put a warm laptop inside a fridge, any moisture in the laptop will be sucked out by the dry fridge air and condensed on the fridge's heat exchanger.

However, it's when you take your cold laptop out of the fridge that it may get problems with moisture. If your laptop is colder than the dew point of the air, then the moisture will condense on it. To solve that, put the laptop into a sealed plastic bag while it warms up to stop the moist air getting to it (although this may be incompatible with actually running the laptop).

[looping8]

But in cases like the one in the article, the damage doesn't matter that much, no? Their highest priority were files, so they did what they could to save them. But yes, just putting a piece of electronic in the fridge for a test is very risky.