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summary:after 2 days light use, computer not so hot as to warp, way too hot for infants to use practically

I’m not a huge puss, allright? I’ve dealt with the rigor of extreme heat on a PowerBook 12″ gen 1… and a PowerBook 17″ gen 2 (currently with failed f****g hard drive I’m attempting to salvage honeymoon pics from; another story). I have the burns, I’ve felt the heat.

All day, all night, I’ve felt, the heat.

Felt, felt, felt, felt the heat.

This MacBook Pro 17″, however, is the first system I’ve had where I can literally say it’s burned me.

Not like “heh, wow… that computer’s really warm || hot!”. As in, “ow!” followed by (several minutes later), “Damn… it still hurts.”

Know what that’s called? A burn. So I now know not to touch any exposed metal in the roughly 9pm-12midnight quadrant of the laptop’s deck (in other words, any exposed metal around the MagSafe, left speaker, the bar above the keyboard F-keys, and ports on the left side of the system).

Really fast, though. Clean. Parallels is great. We’ll deal with that later.

Now, we’ll do the tale of the temp:

Wed, 2PM. In-use 2.5 hrs. Hot, but not too hot

Wed, 8PM. Woah! That left processor is running a little hot. maybe that stabilizer’s broken loose again. R2, see what you can do with it.

Wed, 11PM. Throttle down, throttle down.

note - overnight, i turned the MBP off to avoid mid-night apartment-burnings

Thursday, 10AM. WAAUUUUUGH!

Thursday, noon. Whatevs.

two days of heat: the tale

I’m realizing now I need to be able to graph this against disk / cpu activity. stay tuned.

So, day 2 verdict: laptop operates dangerously hot[1], will burn you[2], but after two days of moderate use, has not burst into flames or popped like a kernel of popcorn.

In totally related news, though, my powerbook 17″ (gen 2)’s hard drive has eaten it while migrating data to the new machine (while performing a backup to a network share on my g5, actually, but same diff). That’s another story, but perhaps the point being… what’s going to happen to MBP17 when I actually start running the drive and processor at full power, as opposed to having it sit idle?

Looks like we’ll find out, as soon as I can find a clear way to map disk io, cpu activity and temp on one matrix. CHECK-1!

And finally, as a side-note, I don’t think I’ll be closing the lid on this one, letting her go to “sleep”, then throwing her in the laptop bag. As absurd as this sounds, I think I’ll be shutting this one down before putting it in enclosed spaces. Just to be safe.

And, really finally, just as I’m about to hit “save” on this, the XP instance under Parallels just rebooted… of its own accord. Again, that’s another story. Stay tuned. hot!

[1] I realize this is non-quantified, since I don’t know what “too hot” means from a design spec or a practical failure perspective.
[2] Which in my book doesn’t really differentiate it much from the 17″ PB.

## update ##

Courtesy of Neil, a debate rages over on an Apple support forum as to whether resetting the PMU (power management unit) can have a hand in fixing too-hot MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

I’ve followed the procedure (because I’ll do anything for laffs). We’ll see what happens.