The Daily Technocrat

Well, it’s winter time here in Addison, so I figured I’d post this little reminder:

Keep your electronics out of the cold.

When you leave your electronics in your car overnight, or anywhere else cold for that matter, they get cold. You know this already.

When you use your electronics, they get warm. You know this also, so I don’t need to explain it.

What you might not realize is that parts of your electronics warm up at different rates. Some get very warm almost instantly. Some can take as much as 15+ minutes to warm up. When you have a temperature difference like this, you can get condensation inside of your electronics.

You’ve seen condensation before. It’s those drops of water that form on a cold can of, er, beverage on a hot day. You don’t want water to form inside of your stuff.

So what is it’s too late, and you’re reading this on a freezing cold laptop you just fetched out of your car? Shut down now, wait until the laptop is at least close to room temperature, and give it an extra hour to make sure there’s no mini droplets inside your machine.

As a side note, you can clean a keyboard by putting it through the dishwasher. Just don’t use the dry part of the cycle, it’ll melt. And give it a very long time to dry before using it. Whether or not you want that plaque in the same place as your dishes is a different story. I don’t…