Macbook fuzz...and what it means to you.

This isn't the first time I've mentioned it.  This isn't the first time I've experienced it.  This won't be the last time you read it.

Ever wonder why your lappy gets so danged hot?  If you have a plastic macbook (pre unibody), and you're wondering why you can't seem to get the Ol' Lady to bake you some bread, well, look no further than your macbook.  If you find yourself,  in the dead of winter,  huddled around your shiny macbook instead of the hearth, you know what I'm talking about.  These things get ridiculously hot!  And that would be fine, if they were supposed to get that hot.  But they aren't.

Early on in my partnership with macbook, there was a moment when I thought it really wouldn't work out.  I mean, there was potential, but then suddenly, when I wasn't looking, it just started flaking on me.  My audio interface would suddenly drop out for no apparent reason.  I started rewriting code I thought was faulty, and generally investigating everything that I thought might cause this sort of thing.  I blamed my girlfriend (I still think, somehow, it was her fault). I went so far as to take my computer in to a service center, armed with KP logs and other data they didn't even know where to look for (or what they were looking at, though they were extremely helpful in every way possible).  Neither did Apple, apparently, because they had the service center replace the logicboard and give it back to me.

All was well...for about six months.  Then it started to happen again.  I was a little more savvy this time.  I opened the bugger up myself.  Uhhh....did you guys even look at this thing?  The inside was absolutely caked with....well....spooj.  It was like a dust factory in there.  Lint.  ANTS.  (they were dead, I think, but still....can't be good).  I had already invested time in installing some fan utilities, but my temperature had still been hovering around 80C at idle (of course, idle means that a lot is going on when you do the types of things that I do with my poor little macbook). 

A can of air later, and a little tightening of screws (with no extras!) and I was back in business.  What had been 80C was now 50C.  That's....well, a bit of a difference.

I did it again about six months later when my CPU started quitting randomly (which was fortunate, since I probably would've ended up with second degree burns if it hadn't).  Another can of air, voila'!

Now I'm on the third can.  I just did it today.  No ants this time, that was a refreshing change.  Still, though, this puppy was getting pretty hot, and I'd lost the minimum of an hours work due to random forced power cycles.

This is a design flaw, certainly.  The real problem is that  the low temperatures will only last for a couple of weeks, and then they start creeping up again.  Because I know of the issue, I don't feel so nervous about it.  I have talked to so many people that have similar problems, though, and they know nothing about it.  The fact that Apple didn't know what to do about the situation just goes to show the level of knowledge that most of these people have.  Its a very simple thing, and I can't imagine that having blown out my laptop 4 times in 2 years from the necessity of avoiding crashes and random heat protection restarts, everybody else is getting away without any problems.

Or maybe I'm just really dirty.

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