hot hot hot hot

Having a look at CoolBook would definitely help you. I have it installed on three MacBooks and a 15-inch MacBook Pro and -after some fiddling with the settings- they run far cooler and for more time on each charge!

I clean my fans twice a year on my laptops, sometimes once every two years, and I almost never find a significant amount of dust, so unless you live in a dusty area, I doubt its because of dust collection.

Make sure you rest your mac on a hard surface and not something soft like your bed, couch, lap, etc. This is to ensure that airflow is optimal and also the the heat is not retained.

If something as simple as emptying the trash is significant enough to heat up your laptop, that may be due to either a low amount of RAM or a fragmented HDD (AKA it takes long enough to heat up, thus something is making it slow). So either upgrade your RAM (the max for your model is 6 GB) and/or conceder buying a defragging program for your mac or backing it up to time machine and reinstalling OS X and importing all your files back into it. If you have never reinstalled Mac OS X, fragmentation may be the biggest factor in this.

Another two options are to get Fan Control to ramp up your fans as the computer gets hotter (as suggested by palokiller) or get a cooling pad, as theanar suggested

I use and recommend smcFanControl. People on the Fan Control page were complaining about it and recommending this. I have my fan on my MacBook set to run at full speed while it's plugged in. That way, it keeps cooler, which should make everything last longer.

I am using my macbookpro 1211 for live vjing with resolume. while that worked fine for quite a time, last weekend the CPU went into core shutdown in the middle of a set. Clubs can be hot. Embarrassing. I disassembled the machine to see if the cooling is clogged or something, but everything seemed nice and clean. Today I read about some cooling problems and stumbled over coolbook. I reduced the CPU Voltage from 1,2V at 2,171GHz to 1,025V. So far the System appears stable. Temperatur dropped from about 81-84°C down to 69-71°C. So far this seems to resolve my issues. I did not lower the voltage bellow that point so far, maybe I'll try later.

Anyone else here got some experiences in undervolting? Please post what you found.

OK, on my machine 1,025V seems to be the lowest safe setting. At 1V it crashes at boottime. Safe boot was required to deactivate coolbook. Returned coolbooks settings to 1,025V after reboot, seems to be fine so far.

Hello scherbenreich,

I've been using coolbook on 3 MacBooks and 2 Pros and so far I can say it's definitely a gem! The lowest setting on each CPU is different, that's why the default setting is high, in order to include even the worse of CPUs, regarding voltage. You should try running the test application found in coolbook's website on the setting you found stable for a couple of hours to see if it works ok too. If you get any errors, you should ramp up the voltage by one click. Generally speaking, you should keep the one setting higher than the one that passes the tests, just to make sure. You should also add settings for the other speeds of your CPU. I believe that sensitivity set to "high" would be perfect for you. You could also try limiting the temperature (the CPU speed will drop to keep it down) however I don't know whether it would be OK for your applications, you could experience video shuttering or something.

Thanar,

In fact I somewhat missed that temperature setting. Reducing the speed might in fact reduce the framerate down to a rather dissatisfying level, nevertheless, a lower framerate is way better than a crash or unresponsiveness. I'll experiment on that and talk about the results here.

Yesterday the 1,025V setting proved to be unstable under sustained heavy loads. I Increased to 1,050V and after a 12h test run in my normal living room ambience the system remained stable and not hotter than 75°C. I'll see if this increased temperature headroom will be sufficient for the real world.

I highly recommend to you to open the case, reach the funs and clean them properly. Sometimes there is so much dust that it forms a small carpet that completely stops the airflow.

Changing the thermal paste doesn't have a noticable impact, at least for me. I just did it before a couple of days and to be honest I haven't noticed any difference. On the other hand removing the dust has a huge impact.

When I first opened my 2 Macbook Pro(s) before a year, they were both already 4 years old. The fans were getting noisy within 1-2 minutes of switching on: because of the dust. When I opened them, I was shocked by the amount of dust that there was in there. No wonder, they were so hot. At the time, I cleaned properly the dust and even put oil at the axis of each fan. Since then, it has been extremely quite and cool, better than new.

Now, after a year, I decided to clean it again plus I put new thermal paste (I put Silver Arctic 5 last weekend). The paste doesn't make a difference, probably it doesn't worth the hassle. Try just cleaning the fans. Undusting should be enough 99.99% of the times. You will see a huge temperature drop.

I have used ifixit guide.

Good luck

Andreas

ps: Watching Video CPU temperature: 60 Celcius

Idle CPU temperature: 50 Celcius