Macbook Pro fans spinning while watching youtube videos

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macuser1232


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Hi, I've noticed lately that whenever I start watching a youtube video on my early 2011 Macbook Pro 13inch i5 with 8gb of ram it starts the fans going. I only have Google Chrome, Skype, and Mail running. It usually never does this but recently it has starting doing it. It stops if I exit out of the youtube video tab or if I pause the video. Btw, I'm running OS X Mountain Lion.
 
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MrBobb


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It's entirely possible the passage of time has the electronics now covered with a fine layer of dust and now the cooling system is not as efficient as when it was new. I would carefully, shut down the machine, use a vacuum hose attachment in the attempt to suck out as much dust from the vents without opening the machine.
 
cwa107

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YouTube uses Flash (by default). Flash is a huge resource hog. While I agree with MrBobb about trying to keep the ducts and fans clean, I think you're better off simply switching YouTube to HTML5, which is less intensive.

You can do this here:
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
 
dtravis7

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To farther back CWA, Flash has been upgraded many times since 2011 and I have noticed here on all my macs and my PC Notebook with Windows 7 even, that the last few updates to Flash have made fans spin a lot more and temps go up and CPU usage is much more than it was a few versions back.
 
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macuser1232 said:
Hi, I've noticed lately that whenever I start watching a youtube video on my early 2011 Macbook Pro 13inch i5 with 8gb of ram it starts the fans going. I only have Google Chrome, Skype, and Mail running. It usually never does this but recently it has starting doing it. It stops if I exit out of the youtube video tab or if I pause the video. Btw, I'm running OS X Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely nothing new...totally normal. The fans on all my laptop & desktop Macintosh computers have always kicked into "medium or high gear" whenever watching YouTube videos. And this has been going on for at least the last 5-8 years (probably longer).

You Tube videos and high fans speeds on a Macintosh computer...go together like peanut butter & jelly!;)

- Nick
 
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MrBobb


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dtravis7 said:
To farther back CWA, Flash has been upgraded many times since 2011 and I have noticed here on all my macs and my PC Notebook with Windows 7 even, that the last few updates to Flash have made fans spin a lot more and temps go up and CPU usage is much more than it was a few versions back.
Click to expand...

Reason why I always turn off all automatic updates. If it's been working fine for me, I have no need to download the latest&greatest, just because they say I should. The latest tend to be bloat-ier than the last version and am not playing the software-needs-more-hardware vicious cycle.

Security? that's another post.
 

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