So guess what the problem was? Go on, guess.
The last time they fixed it, the tech forgot to plug in one of the fans, so the other one was going nuts trying to take up the slack. Nice.
On the one hand, I feel a little silly that I didn't open it up and check for something so simple, but on the other hand, fuck that, when you get something back from the shop and it's still broken, you're supposed to turn right back around, not try to fix the non-fix yourself.
But, I'm surprised that in my googling I didn't turn up anything like "lmsensors" for the iMac, since that would have made it pretty obvious what was going on.
Ah, blissful fan-free quiet.
There are a few programs out there that'll give you temperature/fan information. I personally rather like the predictably named Temperature Monitor. Fan monitoring is, however, a paid feature only - the free version only checks temperature sensors.
Heh - I ran that guy's related software Hardware Monitor on the Quad G5 on my desk at work - the thing has 10 temperature sensors in it! (one, two.) Crazy.
Hardware Monitor is the same thing, but with more sensors. And yep - lotsa sensors. Even my itty-bitty laptop has five or six temperature sensors.
Macs still suck, but they suck less.
Using ioreg to get temperature and hardware sensor readouts.
no more jet engine. sweet!
Ah. It is just like owning a British car. You even get British car mechanics. This is what we call "charm."
See also Unrealistic Expectations, wherein the author describes customers' demands to the Mac Geniuses, including demands that the computer be fixed immediately.
Of course, I think you're justified in this one, since it was the Geniuses who broke it in the first place. I still think the other post is funny, though.
Last year my PowerBook was busted. Sound card going dead. So I sent it to Apple in late June, they took forever to fix it (over two weeks), I yelled at them and told them I needed it for OSCON, so hurry up, they got it back just in time, I took it to Portland, tried to get on the hotel network ... and the Ethernet port was busted. No network. Yeah, that's useful. Great.
And then the thing started freezing. Totally randomly, as best I could tell. I'd be doing something, then freeze. I hard-rebooted that thing dozens of times at OSCON.
Grumble grumble.
"On the one hand, I feel a little silly that I didn't open it up and check for something so simple"...
And wouldn't that void your warranty? It's not a customer-accessible area, as IBM would call it.
A friend of mine who had power supply problems on her ibook, couldn't even turn it on to back it up, refused to take the drive out before sending it in for repair because she was sure it would void the warranty. I was (and still am) skeptical. I warned her it was going to come back reformatted, all her data gone, even though the drive wasn't the problem. Sure enough, it was.
Of course, it did. What was she thinking? That the service center might not do something that probably didn't need doing but was easy even though it just happened to be world-destroyingly destructive?