81 degrees: hot Mac Book Pro after the Leopard upgrade

Well, as you’ll know I upgraded to Leopard and had an OK time of it (once I’d sorted out access privileges). Overall, I’m enjoying the new OS, but I must admit that I’m really missing MailTags… roll on the Leopard upgrade in January!

I’ve noticed a couple of things that are a bit annoying:

1) MY GOD IT’S RUNNING HOT! The laptop is too hot to hold. Toast!

2) Occasional ‘freezing’ of the keyboard. There’s an active thread on this, but my own amateur diagnosis is that it’s something to do with either the heat, the superdrive spinning up, faulty cabling, a USB driver or all/any/none of the aforementioned. Whatever, it’s spurred me to sort out the heat thang…

3) “Airdisk” – vapourware disk, more like. I have an Airport Extreme: it’s solid, reliable and pretty. I ask no more. Well, actually I do: please don’t break when you automatically self-upgrade to 7.2.1 (or whatever). Also, how’s about your claim to make attaching a USB drive a piece of cake and then sharing that over the network a reality, rather than a stalling, fumbling, inept sham?

Deep breath.

I only want the airdisk so that I can back up verily mine laptop using Time Machine… however, as I sit here it’s struggling to do the first 100Gb while tethered to firewire, so I’m wondering how realistic the suggested hourly disk snapshots are…

But I digress: back to the asbestos question…

I used to have FanControl running, but find that there’s a newer version specially for the Intel Macs and I’ve just downloaded and installed it.

Since it’s been up and running the keyboard’s been behaving, the ‘puter is definitely a bit cooler, and there’s a neat display of fan speed and temperature.

I’ve also inadvertently found that the biggest contributor to a cool laptop is wedging a pencil underneath the machine, towards the back. This lifts the rear of the machine (giving a rather nice angled keyboard) and lets air circulate. Basic and effective. Got to love pencils 😉