getting a Lombard colling fan to spin

[quinterro]

Is there any sort of utility to turn on the internal fan on a Lombard? This thing is overheating and locking up. The cooling fan is not turning on at all.

I'm working on a new set of documentation for doing sound at church and am trying to take pictures of the sound equipment. Some pictures were taken last weekend but when I looked at them when I got home most were unusable.

I was planning on taking the Lombard with me along with a card reader so that the pictures could be previewed at the church to make sure they were usable - much easier than driving 14 miles back home to find out the pictures are no good.

Currently it only has 192MB RAM and a 5GB hard disk from an HP Pavilion with 9.22 (hopefully).

 

[Christopher]

Can you spin the fan with your hand? Check the connections.

 

[quinterro]

I replaced the fan and it was spinning OK when installed. Heck even the original one looked OK.

 

[TheNeil]

Can't say I know the inside of the Lombard too well so I might be well and truly off the mark here but is there any sort of thermal sensor that's tripping (or in this case not tripping) and controlling when the fan comes on and off? If that's borked (or just not sensing properly for whatever reason) then the machine wouldn't know it was overheating, wouldn't know to turn the fan on and yadda, yadda, yadda...or it could be something else entirely

Just a thought

 

[Franklinstein]

I've heard of some people (like this one) using the +5v from the PCMCIA card cage to run the fan off of a little switch they've installed. May be worth trying, or googling for other solutions, if you're concerned. IMO, those machines have to get way too hot to get the fan spinning, like 70 or 80˚C. For a "laptop", that's uncomfortably warm.

 

[MacJunky]

For my Lombard I just pulled 5v from the pads on the bottom of the mobo from the USB ports. They are nice and exposed and it is super easy. I have never used much more than a keyboard, mouse and joystick with my Lombard's USB ports though and I can't remember the requirements of the fan so I do not know how this would affect devices with higher requirements.

 

[quinterro]

I have a USB2 PCMCIA card that I can use if that particular change is made.

 

[sircabulon]

I have read that the temperature sensor is actually part of the processor daughter card.

 

[vinbar1]

Hi Everyone

I am new to mac. Just got my hands on a pb g3 lombard and it keeps sutting down do to over heating. I know the fan is not kicking on and I also know the fan works by testing it. So I made it so the fan is always on and I did it very simply. I used a usb plug from an old mouse or extention or a old printer cable just something that plugs into a usb port. I cut it to get at the wires. I removed the modem card and ran the wire through the conection where you would normaly plug the phone line in and then spliced the wire to the fan. You have to cut and splice wire but it was not working with the board anyhow so no lose. now the fan is always on when in use and has helped I can now use it for about an hour before it shuts down.

It still Locks and overheat do to very low airflow and I am looking at trying a larger fan. I was also thinking I may have to replace the heatseak paste it may be old and need replacing. Has anyone done that and had any good resaults?

 

[Bunsen]

Well. I just lifted the keyboard on my Lombard to check. Turns out the sound I always thought was the fan, is in fact the hard drive. The fan (next to the air vent on the left hand side) is sitting there idle.

As I'm planning to eventually OC my 333MHz CPU, I guess I'll be investigating these fan hacks myself.

 

[quinterro]

At the moment the 400mhz card has been replaced with a 333mhz card. While it does run a little warm at times depending on what I'm doing so far it has not crashed since the processor swap. At least no crashes due to heat.

I may still look into the hack for switching the fanon and off but for now it's OK.

 

[Byrd]

I've only ever had the fan fire up on both my Pismo and Lombard when I had them sitting on a soft vinyl chair for a couple of hours watching a movie - it was pretty hot after that

Regarding the Lombard, the 400Mhz 1MB L2 cache CPUs are usually the ones that fail with faulty cache, I'd point it to that issue, more than overheating - they get warm with use, but not steamingly so!

JB

 

[vinbar1]

I have the 333 cpu and I think it is running tiger. I cant get it to run a vidio on it worth a bean. I just figured the 8 meg vidio could not handle it. I have tried swaping ram out runing differant typs and sizes still locks up. And when it locks up the only way to get out of it is to completely unplug it or hit the reset button on the back. It will start back up but lock up again in a matter of minutes thats why I think it is an overheating problem.

Do you think it could be software related? Should I try to get a earlier version of os?

 

[Bunsen]

I get two frames a second on youtube, if that's the kind of video you're talking about. Quicktime (.mov .mpeg) video off the hard drive plays fine. Divx and AVI? Fageddaboudit.

There are lots and lots of different things called "video". What are you actually trying to play, and from where?

 

[Byrd]

Bunsen, definately go for 433Mhz in your OC adventures - I've had two now that have gone up to this speed without an issue.

If you control + click on a YouTube video you can reduce it's quality, giving you say three frames per second over two. Sadly the video card has little acceleration under OS X and generally fails for anything involving all but the most basic desktop tasks. Still, I have 10.4.11 on my Lombard and it's quite happy with a 40GB HD (5400RPM I believe) and 384MB RAM - not much RAM, but it's only a Safari/Office machine.

JB

 

[Christopher]

I found some YouTube videos don't have the option to downgrade the actual Flash quality. Especially on the mac side...

 

[vinbar1]

utube is like 2 frames/sec and video from a thumb drive is not much better I had not tried to copy it from thumb drive to hard drive yet.

Is there an easy way to overclock like on pc or is it a physical thing you have to do?

 

[quinterro]

utube is like 2 frames/sec and video from a thumb drive is not much better I had not tried to copy it from thumb drive to hard drive yet.
Is there an easy way to overclock like on pc or is it a physical thing you have to do?

NEC-based USB2 PC Cards will work on a Lombard without extra drivers. I do not think that it would help increase the FPS in this case though....

 

[Byrd]

Is there an easy way to overclock like on pc or is it a physical thing you have to do?

You physically have to remove and relocate a couple of tiny resistors on the CPU daughtercard to overclock. The same rings true for any other Mac (although you can overclock a shiny new Mac Pro using a software utility available from ZDNet!).

JB