iguani
19th March 2006, 07:24 PM
Hi,
I wanted to advance along the discussion about fans with XOM.
I'm waiting for my MBP to arrive, so in the mean time I thought I'd help by doing some research. Given that fans and hot laptops is my main concern, I thought I'd start with fans.
A few posts on a few forums seem to have differing opinions: one guy with the laptop so hot in XP that he heated the plywood he had his MBP on, and saw heatwaves; others saying it's fine, and using temperature sensor results to show so. Others again say it generally runs a bit hotter under XP, but you can also get your MBP that hot under OS X if you push the machine a bit.
Doing some research, I found this page about a guy changing an OS X property list file to control fan speeds on his G4 MDD:
http://homepage.mac.com/paul74/MDDFanExtensionMod.htm
(Need I say here, Don't Try This At Home, try at your own risk, etc.)
And that page refers to this file:
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleFan.kext/Contents/Info.plist
So while that page is about the G4, it would seem OS X controls fan speeds by monitoring hardware sensors, and makes the fans change speed accordingly. That would make sense, based on previous stories about fan speeds after OS upgrades and the like.
That aside, as another forum post said, the hardware also keeps track of the temperatures, and turns on the fans if it gets too hot. This makes sense too, because I'm sure if you turn off a hot Powerbook and turn it on again right away, the fans kick in at high speed before OS X loads up.
So the first question is, assuming OS X helps with fan speeds, do we need some kind of equivalent in Windows to help? Or is the hardware sensing 'good enough'? Just thinking about the longevity of our lovely MBPs here, and whether the hardware sensors, while okay, don't keep temperatures as low as they should.
I wanted to advance along the discussion about fans with XOM.
I'm waiting for my MBP to arrive, so in the mean time I thought I'd help by doing some research. Given that fans and hot laptops is my main concern, I thought I'd start with fans.
A few posts on a few forums seem to have differing opinions: one guy with the laptop so hot in XP that he heated the plywood he had his MBP on, and saw heatwaves; others saying it's fine, and using temperature sensor results to show so. Others again say it generally runs a bit hotter under XP, but you can also get your MBP that hot under OS X if you push the machine a bit.
Doing some research, I found this page about a guy changing an OS X property list file to control fan speeds on his G4 MDD:
http://homepage.mac.com/paul74/MDDFanExtensionMod.htm
(Need I say here, Don't Try This At Home, try at your own risk, etc.)
And that page refers to this file:
/System/Library/Extensions/AppleFan.kext/Contents/Info.plist
So while that page is about the G4, it would seem OS X controls fan speeds by monitoring hardware sensors, and makes the fans change speed accordingly. That would make sense, based on previous stories about fan speeds after OS upgrades and the like.
That aside, as another forum post said, the hardware also keeps track of the temperatures, and turns on the fans if it gets too hot. This makes sense too, because I'm sure if you turn off a hot Powerbook and turn it on again right away, the fans kick in at high speed before OS X loads up.
So the first question is, assuming OS X helps with fan speeds, do we need some kind of equivalent in Windows to help? Or is the hardware sensing 'good enough'? Just thinking about the longevity of our lovely MBPs here, and whether the hardware sensors, while okay, don't keep temperatures as low as they should.