Yay! my computer's not broken!

[da]

An alarming ailment has hit my new mac laptop. Every once in a while, it has frozen when I had it sitting overnight w/o putting it to sleep; this morning I got a "Your laptop needs to be restarted now." message, and again, this afternoon. It looked sort of bad.

Google says yes, the cause is almost certainly due to overheating; some of the new macbooks are prone to bad problems with that; it might be fixable by involving a service call etc etc.

I installed a kernel extension to report the CPU temp, and it was idling at 70 º C. Way too hot- that was supposed to be the max temp. So I installed a widget to load both CPUs. I tried loading the cpus to 100% and seeing if it got any hotter. It didn't. And the fan didn't get louder, and when I took away the extra load, it didn't cause the fans to keep going full-blast and lower the temperature, as one person was able to report on the apple.com forums.

Then I put it to sleep while I went out to the hardware store. When I came back, the cpu was nice and cool, 32 ºC.

Hm. What would bats22 do? Take measurements!

A one-liner of perl later, I was reporting time, CPU temp, and load average every ten seconds, and I started messing with it to make the temperature go back up.

What did it: nearly closing the cover, but not quite, which for some reason didn't occur to me as a stupid thing to do. It looks cool that way, with glowing screen, and it's less obtrusive. But also there's nowhere for the fan to push the heat, apparently. And once it's up to 70 degrees, even after I take away the bad situation, it's not able to pump that heat away fast enough to get it back down to 30 degrees. Maybe with an external fan, or something, but I'm not that hardcore. I'll just put it to sleep at night, I think.

Problem solved, I think. Yay, my new laptop's not broke!

Right now I've got a background job checking the temp every minute, just in case I missed something, but it's holding steady at 31-32, even at 100% load.

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes- simple solutions usually win. Or, they should.

I was going to put a portable fan next to my macbook, but that seemed the wrong answer for a brand new computer that otherwise seemed to be working OK.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

chelona has a nifty cooling pad for her laptop. I can ask her for ddtails, if you'd like.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks; if I end up unsatisfied with the current setup, I'll give you/her a shout.