Troubleshooting fans going wild/over heating despite no aberrant CPU use

argeliusargelius
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I am finding my MBP frequently getting hot with the fans spinning up loudly. Typically, in the past when this would happen, I would open Activity Monitor and find a particular process (usually Shockwave Flash) taking up an inordinate amount of CPU use (>50%). Once I quite that process or relaunched the browser (I use Chrome), things would calm down.



Now I am finding the same behavior (fans and heat) but when I go to Activity Monitor, there is no process taking up more than 1-2% of CPU. I've tried localizing this to a particular app, but it seems to happen in both Safari and Chrome. (I also ran Chrome with all extensions disabled and it still occurred).



Anyone have any suggestions as to how to figure out the culprit? (If it is helpful, I see that Page Ins: 3.79 GB, Page Outs 284 MB, Free space is 31 GB out of 300 GB).



The behavior I am describing seems to have come on abruptly in the past week or so. I can't pinpoint it to any particular software addition or upgrade. Could this be due to my HDD getting rather full?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    argeliusargelius Posts: 309member
    For what it's worth, I received the following suggestion from the Apple discussion forums which seems to have fixed my problem:





    It's possible your computer only needs a SMC reset.

    SMC RESET



    ? Shut down the computer.

    ? Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.

    ? On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.

    ? Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.

    ? Press the power button to turn on the computer.
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