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Recently I upgraded my Macbook pro with the following:

• Increased the RAM from 2GB to 4GB RAM
• Upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard
• Installed a new battery as the old battery had run out of life after serving me well.

Now it should be noted that mine is a MBP that I bought in early 2007. However of late I noticed that it would heat up a lot. In fact it would resemble a toaster.

1 Usual Suspects

The following could be the usual suspects I thought, one of the upgrades and the fact that for my work, I would be running a host of softwares preciesly the reason for which I had increased RAM in the first place.

After some, what else, googling, I figured that many people had experienced heating problems after upgrading to snow leopard. Come to think of it, Snow Leopard should have made the laptop a lot cooler or probably the Snow Leopard could not acclimitize to the new envirnonment!

2 The Chill Pill

If you are suffering from the same problem, the following steps could as well help you. They did help me.

• Step 1: Reset your PRAM and NVRAM as per the steps outlined here.
• Step 2: Delete any fan control software you have may have installed, except smcfancontrol.

  I had Fan Control installed which requires the following steps for a complete clean uninstall:

  • Open System Preferences - Other. Here right click Fan Control and remove it.
  • Now run the following commands at your terminal:
    1sudo rm -r /Library/StartupItems/FanControlDaemon
    2sudo rm /Library/PreferencePanes/Fan Control.prefPane

  With this, Fan control will be completely out of way.

• Install smcfancontrol which you can download from here. With smcfancontrol you can control your fan speeds. At higher speeds, it may add a bit of noise, but thats tolerable to toasting your Mac. Additionally, you can also make SMC display your fan speed and temperature.

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  Figure 2: SMC displaying the temperature and fan speed

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Now even with all the softwares such as Virtual Box, 2+ heavy Java processes, Flash Builder; I have the operating tempearature around 65. With normal web browsing usage, the temperatures touch around 50. The problem per se is not the operating temperature, but if your laptop runs at high temperature constantly and finally crashes, which did happen to me more than once, that forced me to find a fix.

Finally, take Activity Montior’s help to keep a tab on CPU usage.

List of Figures