Is this safe for my PowerBook

I've got the previous generation PowerBook - 15" 1.5GHz with 1Gb RAM.

I'm currently in university accommodation, and due to "technical difficulties" my room has no heating (i.e.: accommodation services take forever to replace a valve in the radiator). Being in The Midlands in England, and coming from South England, there is a bit of a temperature difference...

Anyway, I've found my PB is quite a good heat source. Currently, I've been listening to iTunes with the medium-sized visualiser turned on for about 2 - 3 hours at a time. After about 15 - 20mins, an extra fan kicks in on the PB - I assume this is the graphics card fan, and it goes off about 5mins after I turn the visualiser off.

Am I harming my PB in any way doing this, or shortening its life? There is a lot of heat coming off it - slightly more than in normal operation (when the really quiet fan is the only one on) Hopefully, it won't be like this for much longer


Also, on an unrelated matter, what's the Terminal code in OSX10.4.2 that lists the top 10 (or however many) uptimes?

Bern said:

To answer your first question, no it won't harm your Powerbook that's why the fan is there.

For your second question in Terminal just type "uptime" (without the inverted commas) and you will get something like this:-

12:05AM up 8:19, 1 user, load averages: 0.84, 1.30, 1.26

The first item is the current time, as defined by your system clock. The next item "up" is how long your system has been running since the last boot. Then you see how many users have logged in during that time. Finally, you see the average system load (the load on the processor) over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes respectively.

Click to expand...

I know about the uptime command - there was another command I found somewhere that sounded nothing like uptime (I think it was two words) that printed the 10 longest times between boots.


Thanks for the words of wisdom on the PB Now all I've got to hope is that the veneer on my desk stays glued down with all that heat