the martian - Survival of laptops in Mars' environment

In The Martian, Watney tries taking a laptop out of the hab to write down a message from Earth but:

The screen went black before I was out of the airlock. Turns out the "L" in "LCD" stands for "Liquid". I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. "Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10."

Then...

on the way to Schiaparelli (well after the hab breach), Watney uses a laptop to synchronise the videos of the solar panel output (he also watches tons of TV which I assumed he did on a laptop but I don't think that's explicitly stated).

How did the laptop survive? Is there any mention of this in the book which I missed?

Answer

The laptop could possibly work or not on mars, as this will depend on the actual hardware and temperature on mars when the screen is exposed to the environment.

The highest temperature in 2012-2013 was 20°C and lowest −101°C. But from May - Dec the temperature was warm enough to use a conventional LCD screen without internal heating. (LCD screens need to be above 1.7°C while in operation, storage it can be lower as long as the temperature is raised before powering)

Now on the other side of this if the screen was heated other components in the system will also struggle to operate. (but it's unlikely a laptop would have that without heating in the whole machine.)

CPU -25°C to 100°C Battery -32°C to +60°C

So to answer the question it is possible that one laptop broke and the other work depending on the environment. Also the hardware in the second machine could be designed for extreme usage not a standard consumer device.

Comments

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