How to know if the System Management Controller (SMC) has been reset?
Solution 1:
Actually, as per my experience if you are going to do the SMC reset and your not fully charged battery Macintosh machine is charging, the charging indicator will be the reset indicator as below.
When battery is not fully charged:
Charging indicator is orange light when machine powered off.
Keep pressing Shift + Option + Control + Power for 10 seconds and indicator is still orange.
Indicator turns to green when release all keystrokes and keeps almost 1 second.
Light turns to orange then.
Solution 2:
There is no confirm message with SMC reset, however, if you go through post checks on the processes it controls you can get an indication of whether it has worked or not (more here). In your case (fans), run the MacBook in the finder (no overt applications running like Firefox) and listen to the fans - if they are running high then SMC reset was likely unsuccessful.
Note: there are different procedures for SMC reset on different Macs including MacBooks with or without a user changeable battery, so double check Apple support online for the right model (rather than a generic 'how to reset' post).
I run a couple of MacBooks including a Pro Quad i7 2012 17" with the 1 GB graphics card. I can have Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator open at once without high fans - although it slows to a crawl and fans rage if I run more than 3 or 4 Firefox windows and launch another browser (for website checking) which is a pain. Flash / Ad blockers help control this but its also worth looking at what is running in the background with Activity Monitor. For example, I installed a programme to force clean Ram memory which will fracture over a few hours of work... ironically when it decides to clean, the programme hogs 95% of the processor and the Mac goes into overdrive for 3 or 4 minutes, so I deleted it.
Generally you have to work more efficiently on a Mac Notebook and high fans / spinning ball are more common than on an iMac or MacPro. Clean the OS, run Onyx regularly (GUI management for the unix maintenance and cleaning scripts on your Mac) and consider Chrome (or other light) web browser. Also look out for anything running Akamai in the background and Updaters such as Adobe Application Manager - they tend to launch at startup and sit there all day talking to your web connection 'just in case' there is an update. Take control with an IP manager like Little Snitch and make these updates manually once a week.