How to stress-test your MacBook Pro

Have you been wondering just how hot your MacBook Pro can get? Well, friend, you don't need any fancy synthetic benchmarks. The software you need may be downloaded directly to you.

Here, we see which part of the Office 2004 Update has the MacBook Pro all hot and bothered:

With Energy Saver set to Normal, within a few minutes of this friendly farewell's appearance (which does not bounce in the Dock so you'll know the update's done), the horizontal strip between the function keys and the display hinge will become too hot to touch. The machine's overall temperature will continue to rise until you click Quit in this dialog.

This has been consistent with Office updates since I started using Rosetta. I had days when I was getting less than an hour from my batteries with no clue to the reason. Talk about the last place you'd think to look.

Why, you may ask, does this procedure spare some cycles on one of MacBook Pro's CPU cores? Blame it on Rosetta. Perhaps when the Intel Mac-native release of Office comes out, Microsoft's updater will be optimized to spread the workload of "while (true)" across multiple logical CPUs.

I know that Microsoft didn't write the installer. Many Windows installers advise that you "close all running applications," so I almost understand the assumption that exempted this test from QA. But I feel I speak for most Mac users when I say that we're just not likely to hang up our work to stare gape-mouthed at an installer's progress bar. Mind you, this doesn't make Mac users better or smarter than anyone. I'm just putting it out there as a potential design consideration.