Good news, so far.

On the second day after installing 10.5.8 on the laptop, it no longer overheats and shuts down.

I can go to the MacBook and click its keyboard and it wakes from sleep, like a viable Macintosh computer, instead of like a dying thing.

It’s too early to be sure that 10.5.8 fixed what 10.5.7 so painfully broke. In another week, if the laptop still wakes normally from sleep, I’ll conclude that 10.5.8 does indeed fix the severe overheating problem that 10.5.7 introduced.

Watch this space.

What it does is allow you to test for stable voltages lower than the defaults for your computer’s various speed steps. Instead of running at 1.18v at 2.33GHz, this allows you to set it to something lower. Lower voltage = lower temperatures and longer battery life. I have been able to drop mine to 1.0875v at full throttle.

It’s not free at $10, but is one of the best ways I’ve spent $10 on my Mac:
http://www.coolbook.se/CoolBook.html

Thanks for the post,
As I am new to using Mac in general, I have had my Macbook for about a month or so. I do find that it gets warmer than a PC in general, but I have had no problems with it over-heating as of yet.

Its kind of a pain when computers act up.. I know.

Good luck.

Thanks a TON for posting/blogging about this issue. While my black MacBook was never as affected as your MacBook Pro, it’s definitely run a lot hotter with 10.5.7.

I’m installing 10.5.8 this weekend, and hope to see the same results you’ve had!

Cheers,
Jed

Don’t know if 10.5.8 quietly solves the overheating issue. Will find out soon. I’ve installed 10.5.8 on one machine, my home iMac, with no problems so far after several days’ use. (I repaired disk permissions and cleared caches immediately after installing via Cocktail in “Pilot” mode.) The Mac feels slightly peppier after the update, but that could be the coffee talking.

Of the three Macs affected by 10.5.7-itis, the MacBook Pro laptop was worst hurt. It still shuts itself down constantly after overheating. I can never just wake it from sleep. I always have to hard-wake it by leaning on the power button. MacBooks are famous for overheating, but this one did not do so until I installed 10.5.7. Now that I’ve installed 10.5.8 on the home iMac with no trouble, I’ll install it on the laptop next.

If the overheating and unwanted power-down issue improves, I’ll shut off smcFanControl (or neuter it) and see what happens. Keep watching the skies.

My excuses for not being clear.

I was referring to the thermal cooling paste that gets applied to the heat sink that sits on top of the GPU and CPU (much the same as what you would do if you upgrade a CPU on a x86 system. (sorry for my bad choice in English words but I thought that’s the correct term to use).

So I had to take apart my macbook pro in order to complete this procedure and it took about 1h to do so with the correct screw driver set . Mine is out of warranty any way and was quite desperate to get this heat issue resolved.

Sorry to hear that your combo update didn’t fix it. I noticed a definite change between the live update (whish crashed) and the offline combo update. I have to mention that re applying the combo update on a failed 10.5.7 didn’t result in any improvements, I had to go back to 10.5.6 (I made a backup of 10.5.6 prior of upgrading to 10.5.7) and do the update.

If the above would have failed on me I would have continued with cleaning out the system caches and performing an SMC reset.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1411

And

For more info on how OS X uses cache files and the boot procedure

Cheers,

I don’t know what you mean by this:

replacing the cooling past. Cleaning up the badly applied paste on the thermal conductor reduced the heat issue with 25%.

It sounds intriguing and important, but I don’t know what a “paste on [a] thermal conductor” is.

Do you mean you opened the machine, unglued a piece of hardware, and re-glued it? Surely that is not what Apple expects owners of iMacs and MacBooks to do. Forgive my ignorance, I just don’t understand what you mean. Thanks!