Cooling your Mac

As you saw previously, Flash on the Mac causes instant heat. Sometimes it's not very nice to be typing on a keyboard that's burning your fingers or sitting with a burnt lap.

One solution i've found, is to try and keep your Mac cool as much as possible. I try to keep my Mac's base temperature as low as possible. The method of doing this is to change the low-end fan speed. This can be done by using smcFanControl.

This application changes your Mac's fan's default speed allowing you to either speed them up, or slow them down. In this case, I've sped mine up. For my MacBook Pro, the default speed is 2000 rpm. I've changed mine to 3000 rpm. This lowers the temperature while not increasing noise substantially.

There is one downside to smcFanControl, the effects disappear upon a reboot. So, how's this fixable? If you load smcFanControl at start-up, then it'll set your speeds. However, then it'll continue to run, filling up your menu bar and adding another process onto your system.

My solution for this was to create an Automator script, that I like to call FanSpeeds.app. This Automator script will load smcFanControl.app from the Applications folder, wait 5 seconds (long enough for the fan speed to be changed) and then quits the application.

If you then set the Automator script to load at start-up, smcFanControl will change the fan speed and then disappear.