[nJm]

I've had my 12" iBook 1Ghz for about 2 months now. I have always found it gets quite warm, but more recently it really gets hot for no reason. I'll just be sitting here using Safari and the cooling fan will come on (I'm using an external CRT, keyboard and mouse). If I lift the keyboard up the metal plate to the left of the Airport Extreme card is too hot to touch.

It has 512mb ram, AE and a 30GB hd. I'm running 10.3.5. I have a friend with an idental iBook, although his has bluetooth. His never gets this hot, and he's using the screen spanning hack.

Any ideas? I also find as soon as I open a game (not that I do that often) or use a 3D screen saver the iBook gets hot and the fan comes on.

All this is while running off AC and sitting on a desk.

Oh, and it is winter here too!

[Randman]

Is it sitting directly on the desk? It may just be that it's not getting enough air underneath the bottom to cool it off. Try raising it a little bit so air circulates underneath it.
I use an iCurve with my laptop(s) but I also have a small pad that lets me rotate the computer when on a desk, but more importantly, it allows air to get underneath it.

[wataru]

Check Activity Monitor (or, better yet, use MenuMeters) to see if something is hogging the CPU. Safari is known to go nuts with the animated gifs on the MacNN new post page. And of course games and CPU-intensive screen savers will also cause it to heat up.

[Randman]

Originally posted by wataru:
Safari is known to go nuts with the animated gifs on the MacNN new post page.

Pithhelmet handles those buggers quite nicely.

[nJm]

It still gets really hot when just web surfing or listening to iTunes. I formatted the hard disk and kept all my installed programs to a minimum. It doesn't seem quite as bad, but still warms up way more than other identical iBooks that my friends have.