How hard to you multitask your Macbook Pro?

I am currently rendering a DVD to create an ISO of wedding photos with music - in addition to surfing the net. I am going to go ahead and play iTunes at the same time.

This shouldn't cause a problem with the rendering of the video, right? ISTATE Pro is saying I am using 37 to 66% of resources and I have 1.5 GB of free RAM. Fans are about 4200 RPM, right now.

I hope this doesn't blow up...LOL

 

Trust me, thats nothing. Youll be able to do those things fine.

I was recently transcoding 1080i/60f avchd footage for final cut (about 8gb compressed, 60 in .mov), surfing the internet using firefox(a hog) with 10+tabs, playing a 720p 4gig file, and verifying and unraring some files.

All of this, and computer was still fine, and I was watching my movie fine.

If you have free ram, and free cpu, your fine. A program has crashed when i was away from my mac, and it was using 100% of my cpu, and brought it up to 90c for 3 hours, and when I got home it was still running fine.

Youll be fine, macs and pcs in general now are way overpowered for what most people use them for.

 

Actually, it had no problem and I just checked the DVD which was perfect.

I just have this fear from pushing my old laptop to the max where programs would 'not respond' - but I only had 1 GB RAM.

 

My main resource hog is video calls on skype.
Honestly, if i leave fans on default the temps go up to 73

 

How do you control the fans? Is that advisable?

 

I multi-task also ---- Accounting, Word, iTunes, internet, iPhoto, etc. --- nothing too taxing on the system ---

Seems my uses are fairly mild compared to others --- MBP also seems to be happy to do all this without busting a sweat !!!!

 

SMCfancontrol

 

Fan Control. Using either SMCfancontrol or Fan Control will allow you to have more control over your fan speeds. The Mac's System Management Controller (SMC) always has final say over the fan speeds, so no worry.

 

I really dont. I open safari and maybe itunes. Thats about it....real good use of core 2 duo and 2gb ram....ahhahhaha

 

http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/smcfancontrol2/faq.html

I found the above. I assume it is the most up to date version, right?

 

I tried one time with Macbook 2.4, 4gb, opening Ubuntu and Win XP as two seperate virtual OS's in VMware fusion, while having itunes, firefox (lots of tabs), ableton live (loaded a set of tracks on that), adium, audio hijack pro (was recording incoming audio from a cassette player) and Word 2008 plus I had a few programs running in Ubuntu and Win XP.
It definately slowed down a bit, but still usable and pretty amazing considering I was running 3 OS's at same time! And this macbook, really, is a tiny thing. Computers are pretty amazing these days

but yeah no blowing up - although i wouldn't try that during summer here (comp gets up to 75 C on a hot day here with only taxing it a bit)

 

Computers really don't blow up. Mainly batteries. In truth you should not have problems maxing out the computers since a basic test case that Apple should be doing in product development is looping the CPU, GPU, HDD, etc. for days at 100% with the fans at max. The CPU is rated for like 100C and the GPU is similar, so as long as the fans keep these components below 100C, which they do, then there shouldn't be catastrophic failure. If the fans can't keep it cool then Apple will use lower power components. This is precisely why Apple doesn't use the 9800M GTX or quad core 45W TDP chips in the MacBook Pro since the fans can't reliably cool them at max over the long-term.

 

With multiple CPU cores and lots of memory, multitasking is pretty smooth. The likely thing that might slow you down during multitasking is if you are running multiple programs that use the hard drive a lot (i.e. backing up your notebook to an external hard drive, compressing a DVD file into a .zip file, and recording a video to your notebook at the same time).

 

I routinely max out the CPU (both cores) on the MacBook Pro 17 inch Penryn doing Firefox builds on Windows XP. I generally don't have any heat issues while doing this and can do other things while the builds are running. Foreground performance is fine. The bottlenecks can be disk and memory - I have 4 GB and would love to go to 8 but I can justify an upgrade for a few years.

The MacBook Pro generally takes whatever I throw at it.

 

Hello God?

That's amazing, so much to do with one machine. All i can muster is to open itunes and use text edit lol.

 

The only time I have experienced massive slow down is from simultaneously encoding video and defragging the hard drive.

 

lol no kidding

it's like driving a car and changing the oil