[umarniz]

I grew up in a city with temp reaching 48 Celsius in the summer

Of course this wasn’t very good for electronic devices and hence every console I bought died with a year of over heating.

For my PS2 I managed to extend the lifetime by placing big blocks of ice in a tray underneath it and the console sitting on top on a rack to avoid contact.

I had to replace the ice every hour but the system worked well enough till the console died eventually of water damage.

[rokizero]

When I was a kid I had an laptop that would overheat when playing age of empires. So I had a bicycle pump setup under my desk so I could quickly blow in some air every 3-4 minutes... If I was to late or forgot the whole thing would just die and all game progress was lost. I remember laughing at the whole situation whenever I had to pump in air. At some point I bought one of those laptop stand with built-in fans.

Thanks for reminding me of those good old days :-)

[jonathanlydall]

I love this story. As an adult the thought of stopping every few minutes to manually cool your computer is insufferable, I would rather just not play on that laptop. But yeah, as a kid, I could see myself perhaps having done this.

[bArray]

Even with a hot ambient temperature, you can still keep your devices at a safe temperature by increasing air flow with large external fans. You need larger air flow because you'll saturate the air quicker, and you have less thermal run-off (close to max temperatures).

[bonton89]

Towards the end of the life of my NES it started to overheat after maybe an hour of use. I remember being very stressed trying to defeat bosses in legend of zelda and save as quickly as possible. For whatever reason, mild graphical corruption would start to appear for awhile prior the system resetting itself so I usually knew I didn't have much time left.

If I were smarter I probably would have just disassembled the NES and cleaned it but I was a dumb kid at the time so I just lived with it.

[sgarland]

When I was a kid, I modified my (shitty, generic beige) case by cutting a hole on top, mounting a 120mm fan, and ducting it with PVC dryer duct to fit over the CPU's HSF (which I think was an Athlon XP 2000+). Airflow dynamics aside, it worked like a charm, and knocked the CPU temps down to ambient.

[als0]

> till the console died eventually of water damage.

That's so sad!

[hutzlibu]

Large water bottles that are closed, placed on top the case and get replaced regulary also help a lot with no risk of water damage ..