How to reduce the workload on your Mac

[Wise Young]

A lot of people find that their Macbook, when they first get it, seems to be running reasonably cool but as they put more and more things on the Mac, it seems to be working all the time and getting hotter, so hot that you can't put it on your lap suffering some discomfort.

I have noticed that the CPU of the Mac always seems to be going at 40-60%, even if you aren't doing anything. I use a program called iPulse to monitor the activity of my CPU and disks. By the way, this is the best of this type of activity monitoring program. Others don't give you as much information and also may tend to interfere with the Operating System.

Here are several ways that you can reduce the background activity of your CPU and make your MacBook run cooler:

1. In the Finder, check the View Options under View and make sure that you have not set the options for it to do relative dates and calculate all file sizes. This typically will add at least 20-30% CPU activity. For example, if you resting CPU activity is 25%, you will find that it goes up to 40-50% if you have these options checked.

2. Run maintenance scripts for your Mac OSX. This eliminates unnecessary caches and frees up disc space for your operating system.

3. If you truly want to and can get along without Spotlight, there are ways to disable it. This will get you down to less that 10% background CPU activity.

Wise.

[Lizbv]

Dr. Wise
Does your Macbook Air get hot or just your Macbook Pro?

So great to see you last week btw!!:)

[Wise Young]

Dr. Wise
Does your Macbook Air get hot or just your Macbook Pro?

So great to see you last week btw!!:)

The Air runs cooler than the MacBook Pro and it never gets too hot for my lap. in addition to having large air vents in the back, it runs at only 1.86 GHz compared to the 2.4 GHz of the MacBook Pro. I also have the solid state Air, i.e. it doesn't have a hard disc and all of its 128 Gb storage is in chips. So, it should run cooler than a regular Macbook Air. I got it in July (the price was $1800).

However, I noticed that my Air has been running hotter, just like the MacBook Pro did after a while. That was when I noticed that its CPU was always going at 40-60% even when I was doing nothing with the computer. So, I started to turn things off. Right now, it trundles along at 15-18% of its CPU power with occasional spikes of 60-80% when I use it.

I have now retired my MacBook Pro to my desk where it will remain. My only complaint is that 128 Gb is not enough. I carry a light-weight 500 Gb hard drive (<1 lb) for backup and for storing archived files. My iTunes folder is 60 Gb and my iPhoto file is 60 Gb.

Wise.

[zagam]

Don't run Rosetta apps. Use native or universal binaries.
Don't run Microsoft apps.
Disable unneeded extensions.
Use preview _NOT_ Adobe Acrobat (as Acrobat has CPU utilisation bug over a decade old).
Disable "fast start", "fast open", etc. for any apps. as these slow system down.
Disable auto thumbnail generation.
You can also disable transition effects, etc. reduce depth and those other things Apple is famous for. Match LCD res and no subpixel.
Run Software Update... Apple are not as secure as Apple users think they are.
Wireless can use a lot of power so can "winmodems" or what ever they are called on Mac.
Disable airport when it is not being used.


With my old G3 I have to stop airport and give it rest when it messes up.
UTP never has this problem. MacOS X is not that good tolerating packet loss, but much better than classic. Make sure you have full duplex at each end.

802.11 is point to multi-point and suffers packet loss. MacOS 8.6 did not like Airport or half-duplex. Running 10.3 .... 10.5 now.

Thanks for the spotlight tip.

[zagam]

Hard disc will be active when a system is thrashing, but it is CPU and memory that will be working hard when that happens. Thrashing is when you have too much shit running. If processes can block, yield or otherwise stop running then they will be swapped out and use no resources at all.

Hard disc uses much less power than DRAM.
It also has much larger capacity than DRAM or flash (SSD) memory.
A 2.5" disc will use less than 2 W for ATA or 3 W for SATA at full tilt.
A 5400/min 2.5" disc will use very little in the spinning ready state.

Ultramobile really need hard disc for swap so that they can get by with less power hungry DRAM. They also need an OS that can yield. GNU/Linux can do that.

The 400 lead VIA Nano processor is interesting (if you can call an x86 that).
It is an amd64, but only has 32-bit physical address space.
It is designed for ultramobiles that depend on rotating storage.
It is compatible with 64-bit OSes.

If hackers want to play with a low power (green) desktop mainboard see the VIA VB8001.
Can be populated to max of 4 GiB, but must share that with BIOS, PCI, etc.

[Imight]

Bookmarked.