FAQ

How does the MooFix Widget work?

The MooFix Widget works by monitoring the CPU temperature. When it detects the temperature is between 65C and 67C (the "mooing zone") it will spawn a process which uses a large percentage of one of the cores of the CPU. This has the effect of increasing the temperature of the CPU slightly. As soon as it detects the temperature is above 67C it will stop the process and continue monitoring the CPU temperature. In doing this it attempts to keep the temperature of the CPU slightly above 67C. At this temperature the fan stays on constantly (at its lowest setting).

Will the widget effect system performance?

You should not notice any drop in system performance for several reasons:

1. The process that is spawned is set to the highest nice value (20). Therefore it is given lowest priority by the OS.
2. It only uses one core of the CPU.
3. If you were doing anything that required more CPU power the temperature would be above the mooing threshold anyway.

Can I tweak the settings?

Yes, you can alter settings such as:

• The upper and lower temperature thresholds
• The monitoring interval (in seconds)
• The number of hits above or below the upper and lower thresholds before the cpuwarm process is either spawned or killed.

What does the process that increases the cpu temperature actually do?

It is a perl script (warmcpu.pl) which outputs the character "y" repeatedly to /dev/null.
This is equivilent to performing the command: yes > /dev/null

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