not for the faint of heart (how to fix your MacBook's noisy fan, pt. uno)

Honestly, with the noise four year-old Mackie is emitting the past weeks I find myself hesitating using him already. And it’s not the sound really... I can deal with it as long as he isn’t awake when I’m trying to sleep, what’s more scary is how high the temperature rises when I start using Mackie. He just can’t cope anymore :’( especially when I multi-task chatting with my family and doing video calls with B, retrieving emails, downloading videos, surfing the web, and downloading music I would see from menubar the CPU’s temperature climb steadily from 63°C to 84°C within ten minutes. This is totally unacceptable and while some people (including Apple geniuses) may say you need to put your computer on a table I’ve had had no problem with Mackie’s temperature rising at such speed and such heat even when I would let him sit on my bed for hours. No, it’s not the porn (as if!) or virus (double as if!!!) that you may think is festering in my computer. The device inside a portable that can emit such racket that would affect a CPU’s temperature is it’s fan.

Of course, being trained by Apple I have searched for quick fixes that can remedy the problem. These are the things I’ve tried:

• Disused printer: Here is a link from MacRumors about a guy who upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard (10.4 to 10.5 for those who love numbers). Good for him that deleting some jurassic printer left behind in his Print & Fax list (found in System Preferences) fixed his problem. It didn’t for me.
• Memory usage: Seriously, the moment I read that some guy filled up his macbook’s hard drive with God knows what kind of files which caused his overheating problem I knew that this isn’t really a fix for Mackie. I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve used 98% of Mackie’s hard drive and he was still cool with it. And while this is not the current scenario (only 65% of his memory was being consumed) I decided to move music, DMGs, movies, pictures, logs, and other non-essential files to my external HD and see if that would fix it. Course it didn’t.
• Runaway applications: A long time ago, I was sitting in training class for Apple and one of the things that stuck in my head besides learning the brutal way of fixing OS issues was the fact that runaway applications can wreak havoc in a computer’s battery and can cause a CPU to work overtime ergo the overheating. Being a diligent student that I am (teeheehee!) I checked my Activity Monitor but there were no applications that have gone Rambo inside Mackie so this is a no-fix as well (check out this Kbase article if you want to give it a shot).
• Fan Speed: Obviously the reason why Mackie’s fan is making noise is because the fan is going hyperdrive in it’s rpm. I installed a third party software that can set a minimum and maximum speed (please check compatibility with your OS before installing). This application controlled the fan speed but not the overheating and the nasty noise Mackie was making so as much as this is a first aid solution, it was like putting a band aid on a foot long bleeder.
• SMC reset: My last resort is to reset Mackie’s SMC. Last resort because that means if Mackie’s fan does not shut up after I do the reset I will have no choice but to open him up. After doing the reset, I noticed the fan wasn’t that noisy anymore, for the next two hours at least and then after that it came back with a vengeance and the noise actually amped more than prior to me resetting the SMC.

I thought for a few days that maybe I can live with the noise despite it being so loud it can wake up the dead already. But a week ago while watching Fringe online I was alarmed to see the processor’s temperature reach 90°C and then the scariest thing happened to Mackie... he automatically shut down. OMG! As soon as I saw the black screen I felt goosebumps on my nape and my head started chanting, “Please do not be a kernel panic, please do not fry my hard drive again, please do not do not do not DO NOT FRY MY HARD DRIVE!!!” With held breathe I pressed the power button wait to hear the chime, then the grey screen with the spinning gear and then the blue screen. I was only able to exhale when I saw the login screen.

Mackie’s scary auto shut down has prompted me to search online for a walk thru on how to open him (MacBook NOT MacBook Pro) up and to clean my fan. The problem is:

THERE IS NO WALK THRU FOR IT!!!

Well...I could send it to an Apple or ARS to have them fix it. But I wouldn't. That is simply not an option for me because I know that they will take Mackie for two weeks and fix it but not really fix it. With the countless times I've read customer's bitch and write "Dear Steve Jobs...." I can guarantee myself that they will not fix my problem. I'm sure some of the Geniuses and Tier 3 and Tech Support are awesome, but there are those who aren't. And them I don't trust. Ironic, I know. So sue me. And did I mention how much $$$ it would cost to send in your toy just coz you're out of AppleCare already?! So I did what every smarty pants does, got my debit card and went to Walmart to buy stuff... Stuff to fix Mackie.

Coming up... opening up Mackie and making my own walk thru!