The Official "My MacBook/Air/Pro is overheating, what do I do?" Guide.

[TattooedMac]

You only have to drag the smcFanControll ICON to the apps folder. You will get a folder with other stuff in it but just drag the

into the Apps folder and when done, click on it and then it should bring up a warning about "this App was downloaded at ..... Such n such time" do you want to open it. Click yes and it should be running. Once up and running trash the folder with the other info in it as you dont need that anymore ...

If this is what you have done, and it doesnt work still, trash the whole folder you just dl, and start again.
I just tried it and there seems to be now problems my end

Cheers

 

[TheSineLaw]

Ive actually downloaded it 3 times prior to my post, so unless theres a better link, it dosn't help, however when I just tried to delete the versions I have atm, it said I can't because its open, if that says anything.

 

[TattooedMac]

Well click on the Icon in the app folder then look at your menu bar and you should see something like

Then you just need to click on it and this drop down window will appear

Then click on Preferences to configure it to how you want

Are we getting there yet ??? LOL

cheers

 

[TheSineLaw]

academics D.

wow I am bad, ty good sir for your time

 

[TattooedMac]

wow I am bad, ty good sir for your time

So it works then lol You will find it does that at times (meaning you cant see it in the menu bar) at times. But it will always be running if you configure it that way

Glad i could help

Cheers

 

[XJ-linux]

I'll toss out that I had a MacBook Air that was prone to overheating, especially when watching Hulu in hotel rooms on business trips. I had great luck using coolbook.app. I think it cost about $10. Anyhow, it allows you to reduce the voltage to your CPU. Basically, it underclocks the CPU in an attempt to keep temperatures down. There is an app that comes with it that taxes the CPU and shows how much juice it's drawing at what frequency. You can then see at what point your system really gets hot (ie: sucks more electricity) and then adjust the voltage at those frequencies ie:866Mhz, 1066Mhz, 1866Mhz, etc... It worked well for me but your results may vary.

 

[TheSineLaw]

another I nodiced is that your mac is only at 50 something Celsius, where mine is reaching up to 97 degrees, would you think this is past abnormal?, Ive had this macbook for just over a year now, and it hasn't started doing this.
I havn't seen it shutdown from overheating yet, but everything begins to lag when it reaches 90+.

 

[TattooedMac]

As in my OP, they are 's suggested operating temps, and they really are just a guide. I dont know what you have it resting on, but try having it with as much air circulating as possible, have fewer apps running and just take it easy on the ole girl and see what that brings up. Sit it somewhere where it can be at its coolest.
What are you doing when it hits these temps?? Does it sit there all the time ?? I dont want to scare you but if you notice it lagging @ that temp, you can either monitor what you are doing, what you have open and try to minimise it all so fewer things are open (which isnt why we bought our Mac in the 1st place) or take it into someone to have a look. (care) ??
The biggest thing you have is you know your machine, and if it sits at 90+ for a while, i would call it abnormal, but thats just MHO .....

To be honest i have 4 tabs open, im in and out of Dropbox, Word is open as well as PS CS4 and im dl a torrent ATM and its sitting on my lap and have today's newspaper as a lap guard (should follow my own advice LOL) and it is still only sitting on 58c ATM. Even when i get my eyeTV going it gets to about 74c at most, but mind you the fans are going hammer and tonk, when in that situation.

At the end of the day, do what you think you need to.
Keep monitoring it and if you dont get a change .........

 

[DHart]

My white MacBook 2.2GHz has developed a brownish tinge in the plastic underneath the 1 2 3 4 Q W E R area of the computer, right underneath a major part of the motherboard. But the computer has never shut off from overheating. It has run with fan blasting for periods of time while displaying YouTube flash videos.

The brownish tinge in the plastic must be from heat, but is this necessarily a bad sign or just a minor visual side effect of the heat?

 

[XJ-linux]

White MacBooks discolor. It's part of the deal. You can leave it turned off for a year, come back, and it will have discolored.

 

[Slydude]

+1 for this being a sticky. One question occurred to me as I was skimming the thread. If it has been answered already bear with me I am barely awake.

Question: When running under Boot Camp do the sensors still exhibit the same behavior as they do under OS X? In other words will they still shut the system off if it reaches the point of overheating?

Last summer my wife was playing WoW and became concerned because the fans ramped up a bit more than she expected and things became a bit warmer. I think the extra warmth was nothing more than heat dissipating through the aluminum unibody but I don't have a temperature program on the Windows side. She notices these things during games because that is probably what sent her Sony laptop to an early grave.

 

[DHart]

White MacBooks discolor. It's part of the deal. You can leave it turned off for a year, come back, and it will have discolored.

Also, part of the glossy finish where the discoloration occurred has chipped off... it seems this would be due to heat, no?

 

[altec-lansing]

Maybe I'm a 13 year old at heart, but this made me crack up.

Yup, me too ;D

I use SMC fan control on my MacBook Air, which are notoriously hot even on the most basic applicaitons. I find it interesting that i can be on the same wikipedia page for 15 minutes with absolutely nothing else open and watch the little gauge go from 45 up to 60 then back down to 50 degrees celsius. I also find that if my computer is sitting on 60 C, whether the fan is set to 6200 RPM (max on my model) or 3000 (what i usually leave it at) makes no difference to the temperature. Granted, I do raise the speed when using Adobe programs or watching youtube videos, but i think its more of a phycological thing

It does save battery life though when I turn it right down. Sometimes it might only save a couple of minutes, but in a couple of 'watching movie' tests, i've seen differences of up to 15 minutes on a 3-hour-life battery. That extra 15 minutes will let me see that last little fight in Kill Bill

 

[Chris H.]

Let me say beforehand, that on a quiet evening in central New Mexico, the interior temperature of my living room is around 73 F, while my bedroom is around 68-72 at times. Continue reading...

After letting my late 2009 MacBook (2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM) sit for 10 minutes: 5 minutes plugged in and 5 minutes unplugged, with no programs running (except for GeekTool, Alarm Clock 2, Norton and iStat and the Finder- all running in the menubar), it cooled down from around 133 F to 119-123 F. Then I plugged in a USB laptop cooling pad from Belkin, and had that run for an additional 10 minutes, plugged in and unplugged with no programs running. The temps there were around the same without the fan. And the bottom of the late 2009 MB's are rubberized. I don't run smcFanControl.

As I'm typing this in Safari, the computer is around 118 to 120 with the laptop cooling pad.

Before this test, I had iTunes, Mail, Safari, iPhoto, iCal, Stickies, Preview and Screen Sharing. Safari was on facebook with nothing running within facebook. On my lap, with no fan underneath the computer, temps were around 133-137 F.

Last night I had YouTube running in Safari on one tab, facebook in another, Mac Forums on the third. iTunes was paused (not doing anything), Mail, iCal, Stickies, GarageBand, Text Edit and a solitaire game were also open and running openly. Without the cooling pad, the temps were hitting around 143 to 147 F. I later decided to plug in the fan, and set it down on a cardboard box. Temps dropped some to around 140 F. I had the computer plugged in full time last night.

After reading this entire sticky, I figured I might as well post my experiment here.


And as I'm about to post this, the temp of the CPU is dropping to around 115 F periodically. The internal fan is running close to 2000 RPM. Last night the fan was around 4k RPM much of the time.

As for my Mac mini- I hardly tax the CPU anymore because I have little RAM running (1 GB still). If I do tax it, the numbers are nearly similar for the fan and CPU on it to the MacBook. I leave the mini running 24/7, and if I get on it in the morning and log in, temps are around 100 to 115, with Mail, iTunes, and iCal running alongside GeekTool, and the menubar applications. If I close out all programs there, and leave the computer running overnight in a 68-72 degree bedroom on a wooden desk from 1965, temperatures are in the mid 90s with fan hitting just over 1500 RPM.

I think I can honestly say that  has you covered in most situations with their cooling system implemented in their cheapest computers.

My PowerMac G4...well that's an experiment for another day...considering the only sensor is a S.M.A.R.T. on a 70 GB Western Digital hDD.

 

[BigDave]

Hot Running MacBook

My MacBook had the Lexmark print driver and wifi network support driver installed with a few qued print jobs pending - ugh! I had already discarded the printer for reasons not applicable to this thread.

I beagan snooping around by looking into the Activity Monitor. It displayed 50% CPU usage rate. The fan was running. I identified the two items related earlier to the Lexmark printer software installation.

Lexmark support site directed to run the uninstall app (Applications/Utilities/Printers/Lexmark). Activity monitor is at 2% or less and the fan is quiet. Yes!

My MacBook is now running coool!!!

 

[GLADIATOR154]

Hello dear friends

First flash plugins problems that use more of CPU still exist.

After experimenting the same problem following many links , softwares and after going trough opening my macbook to clean fans.

Now I repaired all my problems , and I have decided to make a tutorial about how you really can get your macbook cooler.

Before you go to my video link on youtube, I would like to mention two things, my macbook pro 13" used to 115C , after cleaning the fan and installing smcfancontrol , the temperature become between 55C and 70C depend of my use , and my macbook pro is only 1 years old , and this is 37C outside, at the same time I am using heavy applications and also from my experience can advise you , switch off your any flash players or videos on youtube in case you using heavy applications at the time becous the image quality will be really low, u better not kill your macbook, and also think about more watching your stream videos on divx it works way more better then on youtube trust me, visit stagevu for example.

To watch the tutorial click over here.

To download smcfancontrol click over here.

To download coolbook in case u dont like smcfancontrol click over here.


Also dont dont forget to clean your fan , it is really simple and easy. good luck hommies and thanx for comments of those who the had to face same problems , nice forum aswell bye bye.

 

[agent_one]

thank you everyone for the useful infos!

i'm about to share a bit of my experiences with my mbp.

lately it went really hot (90+ °C) also with no program running.
at first i thought FINDER was indexing the whole content.
so i left it running on the desk and after few hours i shut it down.
the next day i turned it on and still the fans were running wild.
it happened a few days 'til i realized that there was a problem with a faulty HP scanner driver/software (HP SCANJET G4050) which maxes out the whole system for a single HP SHORTCUT MANAGER (CPU usage 90%)???

(more infos here: HP drivers max out CPU -- 3rd party drivers?? - Mac Forums)

i followed the instruction and deleted the HP SHORTCUT MANAGER and everything was back to normal. that was my weirdest experience with my mac.

normally i'm working with both windows 7 + mac os 64-bit on my MBP (since i need AutoCAD + 3DS MAX) - on parallels desktop. even with these programs, my mbp never got as wild as when the faulty software was running.

so guys, beware of the faulty hp driver... ;D

 

[Queeg500]

Hello,
In the last week i have become the proud owner of a 15" MacBook Pro.
This evening, i was casually using it on my lap for a number of hours in a room of high temperature. It didn't occur to me for a second that my machine might be overheating and so i continued browsing websites and using TweetDeck as normal.
Whilst on a website, the images on the page became corrupt and my other safari windows would not refresh. Moments later a small, square grey box popped up advising me to hold down the power button and then press it again to restart. I must admit it panicked me having only owned the machine for, well, as little as 4 or 5 days. I did as i was instructed and held down the power button until it shut down. I took it into another room that had a chill and left it for nearly 2 hours to cool completely, to the point of being very cold to touch.
I have since rebooted and have had no troubles but its playing on my mind and i would be interested to hear whether anyone thinks i should give Apple a call and explain what's happened? Should i get it seen to?

Any help appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[TattooedMac]

@ Queeg500 . . . Just keep using it as normal and if it keeps persisting at overheating then yes take it for a car ride to the  store and get the geniuses to have a look at it . . .

Good luck and i know its over a week since you posted but let us know how it went

Cheers

 

[Bigwillee]

Hey guys. Just wanted to throw in my two cents. I'm not actually a mac user, but my wifes macbook unibody was running pretty hot. While watching hulu, the cpu was running over 105 degrees C. Its a few years old so here are some steps I took to cool it down. BTW, I wouldn't try some of these steps unless you know how to work on computers:

1. Took the back panel off and cleaned out the fan with rubbing alcohol. This brought the temperature down a few degrees.

2. Installed an undervolting software called coolbook. Someone mentioned this earlier in the thread but called it underclocking. It in fact is not underclocking. Underclocking makes your computer slower by forcing your computer to operate at lower clock speeds. Undervolting is simply supplying your CPU with the lowest amount of voltage that it needs to operate. To explain it quickly, different CPU dies come off the intel line with different levels of quality. The lower the quality the more voltage it needs. Intel simply sets all dies to a default voltage equal to what the worst quality die needs. Chances are you don't have the worst quality CPU. So undervolting will benefit you in a few ways, cooling your computer down, saving battery life (up to 15 minutes), and extending the life of your computer/battery overall. This dropped the temperatures another 10 degrees celsius for me.

3. Reapplying thermal paste. I took apart my wifes computer and the thermal paste on the CPU and the GPU were a mess. Thermal paste is supposed to be applied lightly in a thin layer. This is in order to fill any tiny holes on the die and transfer the heat from the CPU and GPU to the heat sink. If it is too thick, which it is, it severely hinders the ability to transfer heat. So I just reapplied a bit of thermal paste on there and it dropped my temperature another 15 degrees celsius.

So after doing all this, my wifes macbook will get up to 80 degrees celsius while watching hulu, then the fan kicks on and gets it down to about 70 degrees. The computer is significantly quieter, and I haven't tested it, but i'm confident that the battery life is a little bit better.