[Ti] New 1.5ghz Powerbook up and running

[John Griffin]

Kynan Shook typed this message on 5/9/04 12:15 PM:

> That's unusual; I got a 12" fairly recently, and I believe it was set
> to sleep, eventually.  Perhaps something was running that cancelled
> sleep?  What exactly did the logs say about sleep?

The logs said the system attempted to sleep the computer (I think the
terminology is localhost kernel:sleep sleep not enabled on this machine).

BTW: Has anyone taken the trouble to read through a System log? If you took
everything seriously you would wonder how on earth the machine even
functions - there seem to be so many errors!

> As far as temperature goes, 125 degrees is reasonable; that's the
> temperature inside the CPU.  The temperature drops pretty quickly as
> you get further from the CPU (eg out to the case).  The fan will kick
> in at an appropriate temperature to keep the CPU and GPU cool enough,
> though this temperature varies by model, and also somewhat by
> individual computer.  Mine (17" 1 GHz) turns on the fan at 140 degrees
> F, and off at 130.  There are separate temperature thresholds for the
> GPU, but I've never bothered to figure them out.

OK that makes me feel much better. To me 125° is like the deepest Sahara at
noon! My 1.5ghz seems to run consistently at about 107° with the lid up
during even the most intensive tasks. At least that's what the Temperature
Monitor says.

> Furthermore, even if your fan weren't working, there is additional
> protection built in to every recent Apple portable; they go into
> reduced processor speed at a certain temperature (WELL over the
> temperature that the fan kicks in at - I have never seen a PowerBook
> get anywhere close to that temperature, and I've worked with hundreds
> if not thousands of PowerBooks), and then is forced into sleep a few
> degrees higher.  The only way for it to get this hot, of course, would
> be for the fan (or fans) to fail completely, and then for it to run
> some extremely processor-intensive tasks for a while.  Even then, I'm
> not sure it would be able to get all the way up to that temperature
> without some component producing more heat than it should be.  But just
> so you know, the protection is there, just in case.

I just found out that the fans indeed do work. If you run the Apple Hardware
Testing Utility that comes on the System install disk, during the
motherboard tests it forces first one fan then the second fan to kick in.
Believe me, it sounded like a 747 taking off. I hope it never needs to come
on or it will have me jumping out of my chair.

jg