At home I have DSL Internet service with a very large phone company. Recently my DSL modem has been giving me a little trouble, but I haven’t done anything about it because the problems always corrected themselves simply by power cycling the modem.
But last week the modem started rebooting all by itself and according to the front panel lights it had lots of trouble reconnecting to the Internet. I noticed it would run fine for a while and then start acting up. Once it started acting up, no amount of power cycling would seem to fix the darn thing.
So I finally called the very large phone company to complain and the very polite offshore phone support lady quickly realized that I was an extremely intelligent and technically savvy customer and she immediately said she would overnight me a new modem. Nice. Only one catch, though. It was the beginning of a long holiday weekend and the modem shipped overnight would probably take three days to arrive at my doorstep. Hmmm. Three days without Internet service? This was gonna hurt.
So I did what any self respecting engineer would do … I got a screwdriver and took the thing apart.
No obvious burnt or charred areas were found. But static shock or lightning could have internally messed up some of these components without showing any external damage. Hmmmm. One or two of the capacitors appears to be a little bulged at the top. That might be a problem.
I felt the circuit board components just out of curiosity and holy cow, the DSL system on a chip (TI AR7 7100) was so hot I couldn’t keep my finger on it for more than about one second. That can’t be right. That chip is totally overheating.
I tested my theory by getting a small glass bowl from the kitchen and putting some ice cubes in it and placing it on top of the overheating chip. And it seemed to fix the problem!
All weekend long, my wife and I would put the chip on ice every time we wanted to use the Internet and this solution always kept the DSL modem in operating condition for an hour or two until the ice completely melted and the water started to lose its cool.
Turns out that the replacement modem that was “overnight” shipped actually took four days to arrive at my doorstep! Figures.
At least now we can keep our ice away from our computers and keep it in our sweet tea where it belongs! 🙂
Kurt
