Will cold weather break my laptop?

Question

Situation:
It's -5 °C outside and I'm bringing my laptop to school in my bag. I spend a lot of time walking outside in the cold. Then I go into the school where it's 25 °C and fire up the laptop immediately. Note, I'm not using the laptop while outside, it's on "sleep", so the "operating temperature" in the manual is irrelevant I think.

What are the odds that this breaks/wears my laptop eventually, or shortens the battery life? Has this happened to anyone? Any way to protect the laptop without using an additional insulating bag?

Laptop model: Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi-3525

P.S. Some days it snows (high humidity) and some days it doesn't.

Solution 1

I live in Montana, and we recently had a couple of really cold weather snaps (-22 °F, -30 °C), and I walk around with my laptop in my bag all the time. It should be okay, but especially when it's cold be sure not to bang it around until it warms up a bit, because the plastic components become much more rigid and fragile in cold temperatures.

Solution 2

When you go from cold to warm the longer you can wait for the unit to acclimatize from cold to warm temps the better. Usually the thing I am most worried about is condensation that it picks up being outside or even in the car on a long winter trip.

That I try to remove with a chamois cloth prior to start up (probably a superstition, but it's habit now). I work in a lot of remote places in Canada with temperatures going from 0 to -50 °C.

Solution 3

Whether it's a duplicate or not is questionable but that's not an issue here. For the question should not be "whether cold weather will break your laptop" but "how long do you travel to school" ? A rucksack or laptop bag is pretty well insulated, also receiving bodily heat from you since it's next to you, ... so it doesn't really cool to -5 deg.C at all.

Also, just to add that I've used my HP box (low grade, not any kind of "special") in indecent weather conditions (see also the other question), including carrying in on the top of the car, and in very humid tunnels, and it's still with me. A little scratched, but it works like a reliable diesel engine.

What it says in the manual is one thing; real life is another (laptop manufacturers know that; they don't brag about it).

Comments

[Stefan Monov]

sorry, by "bang it around" you mean I should wait before un-sleeping and using the laptop? thanks!

[Jade Robbins]

No unsleeping and using it should be okay. What I mean is when you set it down on the desk to use it you should be a bit more gentle than normal. Seriously though, I've had laptops up here in the frozen north for quite some time and haven't damaged one in the cold yet.

[CarlF]

Actually if you turn the thing on immediately, it won't have time to condense any water before it warms up.

[Console]

Curious - Why does the cold affect how gentle you need to be with it?

[stone]

Ditto Console's question. I'll go further and say it sounds like you just made this up.

[Stefan Monov]

CarlF, could you explain? I think water will condense, regardless of whether I turned the laptop on immediately.

[Jade Robbins]

Plastic can get fragile in really cold temperatures. I don't have any scientific data or personal experience but plastic that normally has some give at room temperature can become very rigid and much more prone to breaking in extreme cold.

[stone]

That's true... I'll buy that.

[Merger]

@JadeRobbins, here's an example of this: once I took a lunch box out of my freezer and accidentally dropped it. Some plastic cracked and snapped right off it, leaving a hole in the lunch box. I've since learned to be careful when handling frozen lunch boxes. :)