Thermal paste is crucial for the proper operation of any modern computer.  After a few years, the cheap crud they apply at the factory often dries up or becomes otherwise more harmful than beneficial to keeping your CPU or GPU cool.  Sometimes you can see this with a software temperature monitor, other times it won’t seem to run all that much hotter, but simple lock up, reboot (kernel panic, GPU panic), or present graphics corruption.

Mine was “running fine” but would simply reboot with a GPU panic whenever attempting to do something that heated it up.  Once hot it was usually fine for a while.  Lately it had gotten bad enough that it would reboot in the middle of the night, sleeping and cold.  I had no choice but to open it up, remove several screws and a few parts, and redo the paste.  ifixit.com has great step by step tutorials with photos and comments from people who have done it.  This page is mostly just here to document my photos.  This may be my first legit post trying to link several photos on this site.

• How to Install Command Line Tools in 10.9 Mavericks Fresh Install – a simple CLI call!
• Mail.app and Gmail Archive/Trash Problem: TidBITS: Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation
  • Solution: customize Mail toolbar, add the ARCHIVE button, use that just as you would in Gmail (for emails you don’t want to trash but do want to remove from inbox)
• OS X: How to Quickly Toggle Per-Monitor Spaces in Mavericks

Sjors in the ##apple IRC chat room on Freenode came up with a simple script to find large files which are newer than your latest backup:

sudo find /Volumes/Data -newer /Volumes/BACKUPDRIVE/Backups.backupdb/smbp/2013-02-16-044144 -and -ls | awk '{ if ($7 > 1024*1024) {print $11 $12 $13 $14 $15 $16 } }'

/Volumes/Data = your primary drive which will be backed up.
/Volumes/BACKUPDRIVE = your mounted (USB, Firewire, etc) backup drive.
/2013-02-16-044144 = change to match the latest backup folder you see.

Several folks have complained about a faint shock or buzz or tingle (or a dozen other terms) they get when touching their MacBooks.  This explains what’s going on in detail.  Later I will add links to power adapters and such which may solve this for you.

My laptop bit me – the shocking truth

Optimizing OS X for SSD

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-broken-in-os-x-memory-management