I have an iMac G5 (the iSight one) and recently when my sister was doing alot of stuff on it (photoshop, itunes, iphoto, imovie, safari, and adium...she likes to bog computers down) the fan came on full blast. Well, this instanlty freaked me out realy bad- so I got her off the computer, closed all the programs, turned it off for an hour, then booted off the restore DVD and did disk verification twice, just to be sure...
Are these things supposed to have fans this loud? When it happened, I put my hand under the gril to see if hot air was pumping out, but it felt like my hand was in a refrigerator, not a furnace. I'm figuring that this is a good thing, because its not hot; but what do I do if it happens agian? Should I turn it off, or turn the music up louder?
Thanks,
John
The fan in the machine is thermally-controlled. There's a small temperature sensor inside the machine; if it registers that the inside is too warm (usually due to heavy CPU load), it'll ramp up the fan speed to make things cool again. Unless the fan runs full-speed for a long period of time, there's nothing to worry about.
ok, but what would you classify as "a long period of time" ?
an hour? 15 minutes?
also, are there any programs that can monitor that tempature sensor? that are free.
Thanks,
John
oh, the mighty mouse problem seems to have subsided
I use a Widget on my iBook...
http://www.bresink.com/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html
thanks, but i actually found that same program about a minute after i posted! i guess i should have reasearched before i asked...
and apparently it it running very well.
Thanks,
John