Well, to be more accurate, I put a selected part of it in the oven.
I have a HP Laserjet 2015dn in my office that is used as the main network printer. It's a couple of years old now and it gave pretty good service. It was an absolute joy to install in Ubuntu. Totally plug and play. No issues at all.
From the beginning, once a month or so, it would seemingly drop off the network. No biggie, I would just unplug and replug the network cable or sometimes power it off and back on and it would be fine for another month.
Well, over time (about 2 years), it started to do this a few times a month, then once a week and finally several times a day.
I googled around for some insight and discovered that the main circuit boards on these printers were made in China instead of Japan. They suffered from cold solder joints that give the exact symptoms I was encountering.
The fix is to "bake" the main PCB in the oven. No kidding! You remove the main board from the left side of the printer and after preheating my toaster oven to 350 degrees F, I placed the board, component side up, on a couple of screws through the mounting holes to act as a standoff, on a cookie sheet and baked it for 9 minutes. It is then removed carefully and allowed to cool for a few hours.
I figured I had nothing to lose as the printer had become almost unusable anyway.
Well, after reassembly, it has functioned perfectly for over a month now. Of course it does smell a bit like chocolate chip cookies, but I can live with that.
I have since read that the cold solder joint problem is fairly common and people have been trying this trick on video cards, network cards, etc. with fair success. If it worked fine and became flaky and you are sure it's not a driver issue and you don't mind possibly toasting (literally) the part, it may be worth a try.
Consider this a last resort on hardware that you would have to replace anyway.
Disclaimers:
1) I take no responsibility for your crispy components.
2) Proceed at your own risk.
3) Your mileage may vary.
4) Objects in mirror are closer then they appear.
5) Honestly, officer, it was a total accident. I was just standing there holding my knife and this guy came running around the corner and ran into the knife. Backwards. Ten times. Honest....
If anyone else has success (or failure) stories about baking computer components, post them here.
Bookmarks