My 2011 MacBook Pro 15" is getting really hot!

Question

Hi there,
First time user here. I hope someone can help!
I have recently picked up a brand new MacBook Pro for work and its great, however I am facing some slight overheating issues.
Generally, I'm running MacMail, Chrome, Tweetdeck, Word, Excel and generally some kind of music programme - Spotify or a radio streaming service.
After about 20 minutes the the MacBook starts to get really hot, especially at the top of the keyboard. I've had it for about a week now and I noticed today that the black strip that covers the bar that holds the screen in place is getting hot too - if I push down on this slightly it kind of 'clicks' like the plastic there is coming away from the material - is this normal?
Anything I can be doing to keep the heat down?

Answer 1

Your Mac under OS X is only going to slow down a tiny bit when using Disk Utility or some other actions that the computer needs to take stock of the partitions on the drive. This occurs with any partitions, not just Bootcamp. That's the only real performance your going to lose in OS X.
In Windows, because the second half of a hard drive is slower than the first half, where the Windows BootCamp parition is going to go, while booted into Windows it could boot and perform a bit slower than one expects on a similar PC.
So if you were to time the two, a fresh install of Windows on a PC would likely boot faster than a fresh install of Windows on a Mac.
The smaller the Bootcamp partiition is, the slower Windows will perform as the only way to create another partition is at the very bottom of the drive, where the smallest drive sectors are and takes the drive longer to retrieve and write data.
However this only applies to reads and writes (like booting or opening large files), Windows in Bootcamp has full access to the CPU, memory and video card performance of the machine.
However unless your a performance freak, I doubt you will really even notice.