New To the Mac Community--Hi!

Well, after years of using PC wintel-based machines, I chucked it all out or gave it away, went down to the Apple store and bought a MacBook Pro 15 and an iPhone five months ago. It's been a long strange trip, but I'm finally getting into the groove of using my Mac everyday. Mostly I use it for SL or for writing, so I really have not explored all of it's options.

It works great for SL, although there are some quirks. When I use the 512 mb nVidia card, I get very high frame rates and no crashes, but the fans crank up like an Otter getting ready to do a short field takeoff, and temperatures on the top and the bottom of the case soar up to 125+ degrees farenheit. This is particularly onerous, as the heat is concentrated under the WASD keys...yao-zaa! I'm assuming that's where the GPU is physically located.

When I use the embedded nVidia chipset (9400m) I still get acceptable SL performance, the fans stay off, and there is no heat problem at all. I do get periodic "freezes," and I seem to crash every hour or so.

And I always get the "beachball of death" when I try to TP, sometimes just for a second, sometimes for a minute.

Other than that, a good SL experience with the new MacBook Pro.

I do have to note that I went through a period of "culture shock" when I first got the Mac and ditched my PC. I ended up sitting at my desk wondering what to do with this hunk of aluminum. Things, apps and actions I'd taken for granted were no longer there, and even doing the simplest thing took some doing and thinking. Now, however, I'm beginning to see the philosophy behind the OS X.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Mac. Pleased to have ya.

Welcome! how are you finding Mac? you enjoying it?

125º F is nothing... and just fine. be worried if it gets 190º F+
The best bet is to download SMCFanControl. Have it run where it always shows in the top bar, so you can see temp and fan speeds all the time. Set some preset speeds in it so you can manually change your fans depending on temp (like make a 2000rpm, 3000rpm, 4000rpm, 5000rpm, and 6000rpm). If its getting too hot like 180, crank the fans up yourself.

Its normal for it to get a lot hotter when the 9600 is going, so the fans will have to be spinning faster.

You shouldnt get any crashes in SL with the 9400 or 9600... I've crashed like twice ever using this machine with many many many hours in SL. it might just be that your machine isnt cooling itself and overheating and its crashing... there are bugs in the SMC on the Macbook pro Apple wont admit to, and hasnt fixed. If you switch back and forth between the 9400 and 9600 a lot, and use sleep mode a lot, the SMC can get messed up and at times stay ad minimum fan speed even if the CPU is getting up to 212º F.. which is an extreme danger zone, max operating temp of the Intel processors in these is 221º F and I wouldn't wanna get it over 200 at all.

You can shut down and reset your SMC (turn off machine, hold down left side keyboard Ctrl, Alt, Shift, and press power button for a second... let everything up, then turn the machine on normally) and it will work better (for awhile)... or just use SMCfancontrol and take care of it yourself.