Black Macbook Fan constantly running on high

I'd suggest you call Apple. If you just bought it new or as an Apple refurb, it's got a one-year warranty.

Take a look in the Activity Monitor to see if any process stresses constantly the system.

I'm having the exact same problem.

When I opened up Activity Monitor the program itself had the highest CPU reading.

Hmm... strange. You can check CPU usage from the Terminal too: just type top -u -s3 (to take samples every 3 seconds) and look at the output.

The activity monitor showed that the program itself was the highest consumer of the CPU, but by using the code in terminal that PB pointed me to (thanks PB) it turned out that 99% of the CPU was being used by the print manager that was trying to print to a non connected printer. If you check the printer setting and kill the process my fan dropped and CPU cooled almost immediately.

I have been having the same problem with my white macbook and found this thread while doing a search to figure out what's wrong. Thank you for the suggestion on checking the activity monitor, oddly enough I found the same thing - an old printer that is no longer connected (which I thought I had deleted) had the highest CPU reading. I forced quit the program in the activity monitor and the fan stopped immediately. I have since then searched and deleted from my hard drive anything relevant to that printer.

I want to thank you guys for your extremely clever and absolutely to-the-point suggestions. My girl friend had the exact same problem with her MacBook, fans running at full speed all the time (which was a major source of frustration). So I searched all kinds of forums and was given all kinds of inadequat advice (even suggesting a broken connection on the mainboard ...).
So I was lucky stumbling over your exchange of thoughts and - well - the print job thing did the trick! My appretiation.

My new macbook has been running its fan on high and sucking the battery down very quickly. I solved the problem with the same solutionopening activity monitor to view the cpu loadbut I found a different culprit. I have Mail set up to download email from a hotmail account, using the httpmail plugin. It only works intermittently but it appears that Mail never stops trying. My activity monitor showed a kernel task that used over 50% of the cpu on both cores and beneath it the Mail app was showing the same cpu load. I had to force quit Mail too. When I tried to quit normally the app froze and the cpu load rose slightly.

After quitting Mail my cpu showed about 95% idle, even with a slew of other apps open.

It seems like a good general rule that if your fan runs constantly there must be a load of some kind on the cpu. My activity monitor showed the problem, but I think the real pearl of wisdom is in that Terminal command.

You guys, are amazing. Thank god I found this post.

Incidentally, what printers were you all using? I wonder if it's an inherent problem with one particular printer manufacturer. Mine was for a wireless lexmark machine.

And yep, the fan just wound down in seconds, blissfully quiet again.

Only problem is, how am I going to tell my partner that I think we need to send her lovely new printer back?

hey ho.
thanks again

I have an app called 'menumeters' which shows CPU, network and RAM activity in the menubar.
Always handy to see if a process hangs and is using up useless cpu cycles.
U can get it from versiontracker.com

You can also use iStatMenues from iSlayer.com.

There is an option to show the temperatures of many components like CPU, Airport, Battery and HDD. And a MacBook runs a lot hotter under the same load as an iMac, due to the enclosure.

The fan is therefore heard more often.

I found the to offending processes in the terminal but the do not show up in the activity monitor and I dont know how to end them from the terminal. also they are for a lexmark which i do not own and never have

I started having the same problem and the solution seems to be the same. A printer that is ot even hooked up. I wonder if there is a way to get the computer to notify you about issues like this to make problem solving easier?

thanks so much

Oh, while still in Terminal, you can get the PID number for the processes through top (the first column from the left in the top output). You enter then "kill -9 PID number". For example

kill -9 1293

if the process you want to kill has 1293 as PID in the top output.

I just posted a warning about what sounds like this same problem and what I did about it. You may recognise some stuff.

I am having all the same issues that I am hearing others hear describe. I did what was recommended and I only see one issue, it is a kernel task and it will not let me kill it. I even tried to stop it from the Activity Monitor but it will not let me.
I understand that the MacBooks run a bit hotter but all I have to do is open Safari and the fan fires up - this is not normal nor has it been in the past. I have had Leopard for about a year now and it only recently, the past 6 months, that this started up. Thanks for any input!

Just wanted to say thanks! Fans have been running at a ridiculous speed for ages now and hadn't been able to figure it out....was about to send it to apple for an out of warranty repair, but discovered a rogue print job hiding in the background thanks to your advice.

Muchos Gracias

Mark

Yes I found a print job sitting in the print queue of my airport express-connected printer. I tried to print something and the printer was off so it just sat in the queue.

Interesting to note that I'd rebooted my Macbook several times since too but it was still sitting there waiting to be deleted.

Btw with Activity Monitor, don't forget to change it to show "All Processes" in the drop-down toolbar. This helped me diagnose the print queue issue.

Thank you. I was having the same problem with a white macbook. The culprit turned out to be not a printer but a solitaire game widget I'd installed into my dashboard. Silence is golden!

I talked with a specialist because I had the same problem and no program running all the time. It turns out some times the fan gets stuck in the high position. All you have to do to reset it is turn the computer off, remove the battery, disconnect the power adapter, and hold the power button down for 5 seconds. The problem disappears when you start your macbook up again.

I have had the same problem for a couple of weeks and thanks to this thread identified the issue. I had a Lexmark printer process utilizing 100% of cpu, but you couldn't see it at all on activity monitor. I had to use the terminal program to see it.

use the following command from the terminal window to see the top cpu process
top -u -s3

Identify the offending process by the PID # and remember it.

Kill the offending process with the following command

sudo kill -9 561

replace 561 with the PID from the offending process.

You guys rock! Rogue print job... back up to five hours battery life... Life saver! Thank You!!

My Macbook fan has been running constantly for months, even plugged in with the battery out. So I was worried that I was going to have to pay someone to fix it or have to buy a new battery or replace the fan. . . ugh! Then I finally found this thread and deleted the friggin printer and my computer instantly went quite. It was such a relief! Thanks so much!

Thanks for the tip about Terminal.. it found a process running at 98% of cpu where Activity Monitor showed nothing of significance.
I tried your tip on killing it but got the following message :

WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type "man sudo" for more information.

To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.

Password:
Sorry, try again.
Password:
kill: illegal process id: 466-
Macintosh-4:~ rodkeech$ sudo kill -9 466-
kill: illegal process id: 466-


when i tried entering the password no characters could be typed at that spot. Not sure if this was the reason for the message or not . Am stuck now.. any suggestions?? Thanks in advance

My black MacBook used to have this problem when it was running 10.4. there always was some rogue print job or process that would make the fan reach ~6300rpm. but a few weeks ago, i upgraded to 10.6... and after that the problem seems to have automatically gone away. in fact, after upgrading, I've never seen the fan go above 1800 rpm. i'm not saying that the upgrade to 10.6 alone was the reason, but perhaps the clean install might have helped too.

Thank-you for the tip to show all processes. My culprit was Intego X5 Virus Detection. I installed it a while ago as part of a package I purchased somewhere. I used App Zapper to get rid of it and the fan started to slow down immediately.

Cheers

My fan has been running for so long I was about to go to Apple store today. Then I did a quick search and this thread saved me a trip! Thanks so much. This was totally accurate. I had a print job since the last week of February caught up in there. YOU GUYS ROCK!

I am having similar problems, fan is not always on, but nearly as good as!

As we speak fan is running at over 5000rpm, but is nearly 90% idle. I can fire my macbook up, let it log on, and just leave it on the desktop without doing anything and it will not take long for the fan to kick in.

I have tried suggestion above, as well as some resets that I have read about elsewhere, nothing has had the desired effect. As it seems my cpu is not being overworked why does it need the fan to be on so frequently?

What is the temp that the fan should be kicking in at? Currently cpu is 64C. I could shut everything down right now, and it would probably cool down for a very short period, but would then kick again very soon after. I have recently upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2 GB, so its surprising me even more!

Please help, this is starting to wind me up!!

Thanks

I was having problems of the fans spinning up on my MacBook after a few minutes of logging in (cutting my battery life from 4hrs to 1&1/2 hrs) and was convinced there must have been some process that was responsible for this. Checking Activity Monitor or using top showed that no process was using more than 5% CPU and yet in top ~40% CPU was assigned to User and ~20% was assigned to System.

My problems had started after I reinstalled Adobe CS3 on my system so I was convinced that this had something to do with the problem. I noticed that Adobe Version Cue had installed as a login item and as I never used this removed it from my login items. This in itself didn't help but undeterred I decided to remove the entire application - this involves running the uninstaller from the CS3 DVD. After doing this my fans have now returned to their normal behaviour and I'm now getting my 4hrs of battery life again.

It seems that Flash isn't the only pos battery chewing application that Adobe deem fit to charge us vast amounts of money for - it certainly makes me want to look for alternative applications to those Adobe CS tools that they milk vast sums of money for from Mac users on a regular basis.

Greetings everyone! I have done everything under the sun to try and fix the fan from running continuously. It seems that all i have to do for it to go full blast is to simply turn on the computer. Needless to say, its driving me MAD!!! right now i only have running firefox and the fan is @ 6192. I have done the terminal thing to verify all processes only to find that there are no process actively running taking more than 1.4% of the CPU (Other than the Firebox bin and window server (which right now are taking an average of 20% of the CPU between the 2). I tested quitting some processes using the terminal command (while not using the internet) and the fan kept on @ full blast while the CPU allocation ranged between 2-4% to user and 3-5 for the system (idle averaging around 92%). I have even removed all of the background running apps like Checkup, Ifreememory, and Iantivirus and cleaned my dashboard of unnecessary widgets. I did the resetting of the PMU and the SCM. Again no result. I frankly do not know what to do. Other than the annoying sound of the fan the computer runs fine. I did upgrade the memory to 4gigs and changed the drive to a 500(7.4k rpm). could these upgrades have anything to do with the problem? What other factors could cause the cooling fan to behave like this?

here are my comps specs:
Model NametMacBook
Model IdentifiertMacBook3,1
Processor NametIntel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speedt2 GHz
Number Of Processorst1
Total Number Of Corest2
L2 Cachet4 MB
Memoryt4 GB
Bus Speedt800 MHz
Boot ROM VersiontMB31.008E.B02
SMC Version (system)t1.24f2
Sudden Motion Sensor:
StatetEnabled

Although a faster hard drive may release some more heat, more memory could reduce hard drive access. Fan activation depends also on ambient temperature and airing of the machine. If you are using it on a duvet instead of a hard desk surface, you can expect more intense fan activity. And on cold winter days the odds are that under moderate load the computer will be reasonably silent.

I seriously doubt its the recently installed hardware. I also doubt its the ambient temperature issue. My Girlfriend's Macbook is the same model and it does not behave like mine at all. Can a software glitch cause the fan to run constantly? e.g. missing, erroneously deleted, and/or a potentially corrupt system file? Say I reinstall the OS. If I import my current systems (the one with the apparent problem) applications, settings and preferences after reinstalling the OS, will it potentially import the problem as well? C'mon peeps some1 must have an answer to this riddle.

OK, if you can re-install the OS just do it, this will show if your problem is software-related (which is a possibility) or not. Just import only your home settings after that and not system wide ones.

Try a "false startup". Remove the battery and disconnect from the power supply, then attempt startup (hold the button down for at least 5 seconds). This resets the machine's power allocation controls to default levels. That fixed my incessant fan.

This SO WORKED!!!!!!!!!!! The silence is deafening!!! I absolutely can't believe how quite my little corner home office is now . Sigh........... ..what was that!! .... I actually heard myself sigh...

Ah...... ah... oh sorry.. I got carried away..forgot where i was

Gracias mi amigo, mi hermano....

Spot on fix! My Antivirus program was hogging up to 96%! It was under "iavd" After I disabled the antivirus program the fan slowed to a halt within minutes. Thanks so much!

Hi there, thank you for a great thread and forum!

I have gone through all the suggestions above, on how to make my MacBook a less noisy experience. How ever, I have tried them all and the problem remains. I even upgraded to Mac OS 10.6.6 from my latest version on Tiger. (Now, my programs needs urgent upgrades!)The computer is 3,5 years old and maybe I expect to much...but since you pay around 2 000 dollars each time you have to get a new Mac computer, I am still looking for other options. Shall I bring it to service? Would it be worth the eventual cost? Anyone else with this experience? I am tired of break downed Mac computers and wonder, will a new MacBook give me same headache in a while? Is it worth the money? I love the interface but expect more from Apple computers hardware. Any ultimate trick or suggestion on this? (Sorry about the eventual negativeness, but this fan is driving me nuts!) Thanks for your help

My config:

ModellnamntMacBook
ModellidentifieraretMacBook2,1
ProcessornamntIntel Core 2 Duo
Processorhastighett2 GHz
Antal processorert1
Totalt antal kärnort2
L2-cachet4 MB
Minnet2 GB
Busshastighett667 MHz
Boot ROM-versiontMB21.00A5.B07
SMC-version (system)t1.13f3