Macbook Pro getting hot

[Dave2002]

Dave

LMS automatically running on startup
Method 1) On Windows you can stop LMS automatically starting when you start the computer by right clicking on the TrayIcon and clicking on "Automatically run at login" (this acts as a toggle). I imagine there is a similar option on a Mac.

Method 2) Once again in Windows, you can set LMS to run or not run at login by opening the "Control Panel" (from the TrayIcon, from the Start/Programs, or running "squeezeboxcp.exe") and setting the option in the Status tab. Presumably there is something similar on a Mac.

BBC iPlayer
For information, things have now settled down with regard to the BBC Radio Live and Listen Again and, currently, the best solution is given in this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...uick-fix-guide. It explains how to install the "alpha" version of Triode's BBCiPlayer plugin which can deal with the new HLS streams, both live (320kbps) and listen again (128kbps). However, as the BBC has removed the R3 320kbps from the new HLS LA streams the thread also explains how to install the "BBC iPlayer Extras" plugin, which uses the old RTMP/AAC (while they exist) and gets R3 LA at 320kbps (together with 4 weeks availability). All the installations are via the standard method - no hacks involved.

If you really want to uninstall LMS from your computer, surely there is a standard procedure for doing that on a Mac. I find LMS extremely valuable, but perhaps you don't. These days it is one of the few ways to play BBC R3 Live/Listen Again at 320 kbps and stream it to your audio system.

It's not quite as easy as one might hope. I have other versions of LMS running on other machines, so I don't really need it on my MBP. Given recent performance/stability problems I'd be very happy to clear it, and have any other programs which might be causing problems, taken off.

The method shown here may be effective - http://forums.myvoco.com/showthread.php?tid=10 - but some other, seemingly easy, methods, do not work.

Re stopping things running at startup - some programs are disobedient. That was why I finally dumped Spotify - if I tick a box to say "do not run at start up" I really don't want to see it on my disply.

[johnb]

Dave, I edited my post to include how to stop the LMS automatic updates and the nag message.

That seems a rather complicated procedure just to remove a program - is the complexity due to the LMS software or the Mac OS?

[Dave2002]

Dave, I edited my post to include how to stop the LMS automatic updates and the nag message.

That seems a rather complicated procedure just to remove a program - is the complexity due to the LMS software or the Mac OS?

For most applications removal is simple on Macs. Just move the application icon to the Trash, and empty that. For fairly well behaved programs that should get rid of everything. Some are not so well behaved, and perhaps some form of clean up afterwards is needed, though many users won't know about that, or indeed how to do it. There are some apps available which it's claimed will do that.

I have one problem program right now - which is the Amazon MP3 Installer. This won't go quietly, and is apparently corrupted. I tried a different approach, which was to download a new copy (even though it's an old, probably obsolete, program), but that showed up other problems. I'm going to do a full backup in the next few days, then take some form of scalpel to that program to get it off my machine.

When Macs work well, they do very well, but when they start to play up they can be at least as bad as Windows.

The problem with the LMS is that is - er - a server, so doesn't appear as a program in the Applications folder. I don't know if there's a standard location for servers within Mac OS X - and trying to search for the server components simply takes one back to the Preferences pane. This is really rather poor, I'm afraid.

Thanks for the info on trying to prevent the updates and the nag message. I'll see if I can make that work on this machine.

[Anastasius]

Eek..you got rid of Spotify? Now what is that superb BBC Playlister going to use ? Such a brilliant use of resources, Playlister.......[end sarcasm mode]

I use App Zapper which is very good. According to Amazon all you need do is drag the application to trash and then delete it from there. That is then supposed to remove all the files. LMS can be removed here http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f1...-10-9-a-21738/ according to Google .

And there is this about the Installer http://www.friday.com/bbum/2007/09/2...ing-installer/

[Nick Armstrong]

sarcasm mode

That one really loads your CPU I find!

I have one problem program right now - which is the Amazon MP3 Installer.

That's interesting... The whole Amazon MP3 downloader / Amazon Music application thing is a complete mess, and doesn't work when you want to use it. It hadn't struck me it might be buggering things up more generally. I'd like to get rid of it too. Let us know how you get on

[Dave2002]

Eek..you got rid of Spotify? Now what is that superb BBC Playlister going to use ? Such a brilliant use of resources, Playlister.......[end sarcasm mode]

I use App Zapper which is very good. According to Amazon all you need do is drag the application to trash and then delete it from there. That is then supposed to remove all the files. LMS can be removed here http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f1...-10-9-a-21738/ according to Google .

And there is this about the Installer http://www.friday.com/bbum/2007/09/2...ing-installer/

My version of the OS is 10.8.5.

The "right click" method definitely does not work on my machine.

I'm hoping the Amazon MP3 thing is actually benign, and obsolescent, and eventually I'll find a way of getting rid of it. If I select it using the list form of GUI (doesn't work by selecting the icon) I can try to move it to the Trash. At that point it asks for a password - presumably the password for the machine. That's where I stop - for the moment at least - as there's always a possibility that it could be something which wants to acquire my password, then come back later to haunt me. OTOH it could well be not a problem, but until I've done a complete backup and taken some other precautions, I'm not going to go there.

It does also seem odd that trying to download the MP3 installer thing again from the Amazon site shows up other problems - probably not malicious, but just simply incompetent and/or out of date code.

As I wrote earlier, removing Spotify is not a great loss, as I have it on other machines, and on my iPad (though the iPad version is rubbish in comparison), and I should be able to download it again if I want to.

The App Trap application might be useful for removing vestiges of files which have been left behind, though the problem with so many of these tools is that there is still a significant issue of trust. Indeed, with computers capable of doing millions of operations each second, the trust thing is almost impossible to resolve. We trust our machines to behave in certain ways, and 99% of the time they do - could actually be more like 99.999% of the time for a machine in good condition, with good software, but what does one do about the remainder?

I once worked on a machine which was by then being used in production, and wrote code. It was assembler code, used to port a high level compiler for a systems language. Mostly the code either worked, or seemed to, or simply failed. However, one day I wrote some code and as soon as I ran my program the whole multi-user machine stopped, and everyone retired to the tea room. This wasn't too unusual in those days, so there was no immediate reason to suspect my code. However, it happened again a while later, whereupon I became very much more cautious about my code, and tried to check it very much more carefully, and made a mental note not to run it again for a day or two. I had previously worked for the manufacturer of the computer (a large mainframe) and in theory the crash should not have happened, as it should have been trapped in the hardware. When I did run it again, the same thing happened yet again. Eventually it was confirmed by the system manager, after examining core dumps, that my code had been the culprit. Eventually I think it was all sorted, and I think my code was fixed as well. Even very small errors in code can have a very big effect. It was interesting to me that the hardware protection features which had been explained to me in a talk I'd attended a few years earlier by the designer clearly did not work!

Maybe that wasn't so unusual. I once went to a talk by someone from Manchester University about the design of an asynchronous high performance elctronic circuit. Eventually it was admitted by the speaker that it wasn't actually designed that way. It was a clocked circuit (synchronous) so should not have been subject to races and hazards, but performed rather well - I can't remember the details exactly, but it may have performed at twice its design speed. Eventually they examined the circuit design and found that it was fine as an asynchronous circuite (i.e race and hazard free), and when they checked back with the hardware it was discovered that the clock line had never been connected! They had been puzzled about why it performed so well, allegedly.

We trust that the hardware and software in systems is OK, but even very small changes can have an enormous effect. That is why in safety critical systems much greater care is needed, and in some systems, such as aircraft, there are [hopefully] many more checks on how things work etc.

[Anastasius]

Are you sure you are downloading the original Installer from Amazon and not the one that they now call Downloader? The password you are being asked for is your Mac admin password.

Often computer code fails because of incorrect assumptions. The early 6502 processor inside Apple II's and other computers had two modes of working. Binary or decimal. You sent it a single byte instruction to tell it to go into decimal mode. The assumption was that on switch on it would default to binary. It did. 99% of the time. The other 1% whatever program you were running worked very strangely.

[Dave2002]

The early 6502 processor inside Apple II's and other computers had two modes of working. Binary or decimal. You sent it a single byte instruction to tell it to go into decimal mode. The assumption was that on switch on it would default to binary. It did. 99% of the time. The other 1% whatever program you were running worked very strangely.

I wonder if that was the case - could have been. It is certainly possible that hardware systems can behave seemingly randomly, as also some software systems, particularly ones which operate using interrupts, as there is no way of predicting when interrupts are going to occur.

Yes, indeed I did write 6502 code at one time, though I never noticed that particular 6502 problem. The 6502 was a rather simple processor, and didn't have any significant hardware protection features, unlike some earlier mainframe CPUs.

[Anastasius]

.....didn't have any significant hardware protection features, unlike some earlier mainframe CPUs.

LOL....it didn't have any!

[Dave2002]

LOL....it didn't have any!

You got that right!

[Dave2002]

Just tried to watch a film courtesy of Curzon cinema/Times Plus.

Kicked off in Firefox, and almost immediately the fans started up. Silverlight was installed, and seemingly necessary.
Then abandoned that, and tried Chrome instead. That resulted in a message that Silverlight is needed to see the film, and not supported in Chrome.
Then tried Safari - as that is apparently the other recommended browser. That didn't work at all - the streaming simply didn't get started, so then abandoned again and reverted to Firefox.

Closed down almost all the other running programs, but still got hot very quickly.

Finally decided to try with the anti virus turned off (one of the well known ones - mentioned before), and that worked OK-ish. The MBP "merely" got slightly warm, but it wasn't struggling as it had been earlier on.

Can't totally blame the anti-virus, as some of the issues might have been due to trying to run the external display (TV) via an HDMI cable. It did look a bit as though there was a problem with the displays, as the AirPlay mirroring seemed to come on, as well. There wasn't anything obviously problematic - but then there hardly ever is. Not as if any program is getting up to 100% of the CPU, or if there are problems with memory etc. Maybe the problems are due to the graphics chips. Big puzzle!

[Dave2002]

There really does seem to be a strong connection between running Spotify and my MacBook Pro getting hot. Starts to warm up within one or two minutes.

It's not the only thing that causes heating, but it does seem to kick it off very quickly.

There may be simple things which would improve the situation, such as clearing backing store memory, but right now I can't figure out what might make a difference and hopefully an improvement, and/or why.

[Anastasius]

Ditch Spotify. Try Qobuz.

[Dave2002]

Ditch Spotify. Try Qobuz.

Thanks for the suggestion. I may try - but perhaps not now. Trouble is I still find Spotify rather useful on occasions - and I've not got round to comparing Qobuz. Is the catalogue as comprehensive as Spotify? It's largely because of the catalogue that I still keep a Napster account - as there is music which doesn't appear on other streaming services, even if finding it and navigating is a pain.

In the meantime I found this - "purge" - http://osxdaily.com/2012/04/24/free-...purge-command/

This doesn't solve every problem, but clearly goes some way towards it.

I also suspect that if I back some files off to an external drive that I will get a benefit, as the memory management system and swap space etc. will work more effectively to and from the SSD.