[iBook] Noisy iBook

[Charles Pearce]

On Oct 31, 2005, at 11:32 PM, Samantha Cornell wrote:

> We have two G4 iBooks (1.2 GHz, 768 MB, 20 Gig, 12", 10.4.2), both  
> purchased about 6 months ago.  Within the past week or so, both  
> have started making an annoying noise.  It appears to come from the  
> top left-hand side, by the escape key.  It sounds like either the  
> hard drive is spinning (noisily) or the fan is running (noisily).   
> Both machines seem to be hot, but likely no hotter than usual.
>
> Has anyone experienced this?  Any idea what it is?  It's not  
> horrible loud, but loud enough to be noticeable in a meeting.   
> Apart from the annoyance factor, I'm also concerned about the  
> possibility that it is a hard-drive noise.
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

It is fairly common that the fan kicks on when the thing starts  
heating up, especially if there's no way for the heat to dissipate.  
On mine (700Mhz G3), the bottom gets so hot at times that I think one  
could iron clothes, or at least straighten hair with it. It usually  
gets really hot when it is sitting flat on a surface that doesn't  
allow air to circulate under it. There are laptop holders that do two  
things: lift it so air can get under it, and tilt it so that the  
angle is better for typing and seeing the screen. I don't have one of  
those things, so when it happens, I just put a stapler or something  
under it to lift it.

Yesterday, I was running Norton Anti-Virus for the first time on my  
iBook (somebody sent me a document infected with a Word macro virus)  
and it was scanning thousands of files which caused the hard drive to  
work really, really hard. In minutes it had heated up to the point  
where I had to pull out my stapler. When this happens to you, is your  
hard drive doing some kind of intense work? If you don't have much  
RAM, it could be using your hard drive a lot for virtual memory-- 
especially when running something RAM-intensive like PhotoShop.

Hope this helps.

Charles Pearce (charlesp at ksu.edu)