> > My previous laptop, an old Pentium 233MMX Toshiba, used to have an > address that when written some values, it would start/stop the internal > fan. I don't know if something similar exists for the Powerbook, but > sometimes, the fan kicks in when the computer is iddle doing nothing (I > mean, it kicks in when it receives mail, but I hardly believe it can > take soooo much power as to launch the fans!) and it would be nice to be > able to do something about it. > > How good is the power control in the Powerbooks? any ideas/suggestions?
Each single apple motherboard uses a different fan control mecanism and none of them is documented and none of them is opensourced in darwin... On some machines, the thermostat is configured once for all by the firmware and seem pretty happy that way, on others, it seems the firmware setting is a bit too "paranoid" and would benefit from some work, and finally, some machines seem to lose the firmware setting during sleep. But so far, we just lack informations about how those things work on most models. The albooks seem to use known industry thermostat though, it may be possible to write drivers for them, though I don't have time to dive into that now. Every single motherboard model made by apple need a specific driver for that it seems :( Ben.
