[tonewheel]

The fan in my TiBook kicks on after about 30 minutes of use, and pretty much stays on all the time. (It's on right now.) When I place a finger near the fan grill at the rear center of the computer case, I cannot feel any air movement whatsoever. Is this the case with your TiBook? Is it pulling air in rather than venting it out?

[Ryu]

I was always curious about that concerning the latest Apple notebooks. My iBook does that too and I always wondered. Well, fortunately, it is pretty much silent compared to my friends Dell whose fan makes more noise than an airplane when it turns on (actually, I've never seen it going off... but anyway)

[Sean Li]

Originally posted by tonewheel:
<STRONG>The fan in my TiBook kicks on after about 30 minutes of use, and pretty much stays on all the time. (It's on right now.) When I place a finger near the fan grill at the rear center of the computer case, I cannot feel any air movement whatsoever. Is this the case with your TiBook? Is it pulling air in rather than venting it out?</STRONG>

I think it's pulling air in - I put a small piece of paper there, and it got pulled onto the grill. If the fan comes on though it switches off after a few minutes. You'd think that with the amount of noise it makes there would be a small blizzard behind the PowerBook.

I've noticed though that it comes on much less, but for longer intervals than the fast Pentium notebooks.

[cpatubo]

Not to be a broken record, If you are concerned about your fan being on all the time, buy yourself a Podium Coolpad!

[Circa]

My fan rarely ever comes on... never heard it go on unless I put a cd in there.

[dtnh]

Here's my experience with the fan in my TiBook (500Mhz/512Mb) running OS X.

First, I'm reading the temp. using the ThermoInDock utility and a hacked Darwin kernel to enable temperature polling. By default it seems you cannot get a reading from the CPU under OSX unless you have a darwin kernel that has polling enabled. (for info, check out the developers web site. utility can be found on versiontracker).

When the system is idle, the temp hovers around 26C to 32C but the
fan doesn't turn on.

Light use, say using a web browser, finder etc. the fan doesn't kick in. But start a number crunching application say like SETI and poof, temp will jump right up to around 44C within a 30 second polling period. Makes sense to me as the application uses more functions of the CPU and memory generating lots O heat.

The fan will turn on when the processor temp. hits about 52C or 56C
and stops when the temp. reads about 44C.

I find the fan definitely too noisy and mine, after 4 months of constant use and some SETI crunching has gotten loud and sometimes fails to start; the fan is now sticking. I use a toothpick or pen cap to kick start the blades when I see the temperature dockling say 64C... too hot for a lap in the summertime for sure !

Called today and am sending it back to have the fan replaced (and the darn battery compartment fixed). I'm worried that running at 64C for long periods will eventually toast the CPU and the noise the fan now makes when it tries to spin up is...painful to listen to !

Another tidbit, using an infared temperature unit at work I found the temperature of the case bottom, after the fan was on to be around 47C. Didn't get a chance to measure it over time, but to me, too hot for a laptop on anything but thick blue jeans.

I'd imagine the 400Mhz unit or one with a bit less memory to be a tad bit cooler... maybe.

-dt-

Note: Your milage may vary here. I read an app note off Motorola's site indicating the temperature polling algorithm needs to be qualified with a known constant and accuracy can vary a few degrees. Maybe one reason Apple disabled this feature on the TiBook kernel. My dual G4/500 hums along at 40C to 52C 24/7.

[Circa]

dtnh thank you for this information its very helpful. I also heard that people are having the fan come on in os x more than os 9. Does anyone agree with this statement?

I can not tell you how this relates to my lombard cause I am not using os X at the moment.

[King Chung Huang]

The fan in the TiBook G4/400 I use has only come on once ever since I started using it 4 months ago. That was when I had it in bed watching a DVD.

I find it odd that some of your fans come on so often. I put my PowerBook through some pretty hot situations. My current project involves shooting QuickTime VR nodes for an entire University campus. To do that, I have the PowerBook G4 in my backpack (the one from WWDC), with pads of sticky notes to keep it propped open so that it can't go to sleep. Then, while I'm shooting each VR node, it's processing away on the images with scaling, rotating, stitching, compressing, etc. In all four of my shoots so far, with each one lasting about 3 hours in hot weather, the fan has never come on.

[jeromep]

Depending on how "hard" you are using your computer or rather how intense the processing you are doing is, the fan may or may not come on. I'm noticing that on the G4 PowerBook fan usage is a pretty common occurance, but on the G3s, it was much less frequent, if at all. Lucky for all of us, Apple actually specs parts for their PowerBooks that are generally superior to what our PC counterparts end up purchasing and fans and the like are generally quite silent.

[seb2]

Originally posted by Circa:
<STRONG>dtnh thank you for this information its very helpful. I also heard that people are having the fan come on in os x more than os 9. Does anyone agree with this statement?</STRONG>

totally agree. i have a ti 400/384 and in 9.1 the fan came on once. under x, this is quite common. especially when using processor-intense applications like mozilla/fizilla or limewire (or java in general)

i often have a "top" running in the background and the closer processor idle time comes to 0, the more often the fan comes on.

well, there's got to be a reason why the battery lasts shorter under x...