Heat and fan issues.

Hello,
I have a 2.16GHz Macbook Pro with 3MB RAM. Recently, and seemingly out of nowhere, my laptop has been heating up a lot and the fans have been running extremely fast. I downloaded SMCfancontrol to see just how bad the problem was. Doing nothing more than browsing the internet my laptop will heat up to between 75 and 85 degrees Celsius and the fans will go as high as 6000rpm! I've never had this problem before and I have no idea why it started. I've read that the MBP will shut down automatically if it gets to hot, so I'm not too worried about it overheating, but I am worried about why this high heat is occurring, and what damage may be done to the fans running at 6000rpm's for long periods of time. I also can't imagine its good for the computer to be running at 80 degrees Celsius for long periods of time either. I've checked the Activity Monitor for CPU usage and nothing seems out of the ordinary, nothing that I can see is using a ton of CPU, etc. Does anyone have any idea why this could be occurring, the dangers associated with it, what I could do to fix the problem or find out what the problem is, etc.??? Thanks!!!

If you can't find anything in activity monitor which is using so much of cpu then may be its time for you to try doing a fresh install oh mac os and see if that fixes the issue!
With ur concern with fan running at 6000 rpm, obviously, its a mechanical thing & more rpm would shorten its life.

What kinds of programs are you running? What kinds of surfaces are you using your MBP on? If the surfaces dont allow proper ventilation (like a blanket or a rug), your MBP will heat up.

I had the same thing happen. Make sure you check 'all processes' in the activity monitor. Sometimes if its only showing 'my processes' you'll miss something. Mine was because of an anti virus software that was running. It also runs hot when the trash is emptying. Are you running parallels? I know it can hog up some cpu.

I am having a similar problem as well. The activity monitor shows that my Safari is at 90% under processes, which is strange because it also showed that last night when i checked and i had quit Safari and turned off AirPort.

Any advice?