macbook 13' overheating

eurotrotter

hey gang
hope yer all well

my 2 year old macbook always seems to have the fan on, and its quite loud all the time.

im over in germany and its 22 C here most days, and all i hear is the fan on a lot of the time

im not running that many apps simultaneously either, so not sure what might a brought this on

any ideas?


thanks
ed

Sad Professor

Hey eurotrotter.

Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities/), click the CPU tab and watch for any misbehaving apps or processes.

eurotrotter

thanks for that prof.
ther are programmes on the list occuppying large %, bt i have no idea what they are, would u mind taking a look at the attached screenshot

thanks
ed

Sad Professor wrote: »

Hey eurotrotter.

Open up Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities/), click the CPU tab and watch for any misbehaving apps or processes.

pvik00

According to your screenshot spotlight's indexing (mds) is responsible for the heat.
Not only it dives up CPU but is also heavy on I/O.

Try troubleshooting spotlight, there can be many root causes for it misbehaving.
The most common one is when your .Spotlight-V100 directory on the startup volume goes corrupt. In this case removing it and rebooting will resolve the problem. Note that Spotlight will still do a full reindexing of your drive. Make sure that there's sufficient free space for this plus any potential paging activity on that drive.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-123403.html

If you don't use Spotlight, you might as well turn it off.

eurotrotter

thanks for that, is there a simple way of disabling spotlight

i want to be able to enable it easily as in for it just to be a a case of 'turning on' the application, with the tick of a box or something

pvik00 wrote: »

According to your screenshot spotlight's indexing (mds) is responsible for the heat.
Not only it dives up CPU but is also heavy on I/O.

Try troubleshooting spotlight, there can be many root causes for it misbehaving.
The most common one is when your .Spotlight-V100 directory on the startup volume goes corrupt. In this case removing it and rebooting will resolve the problem. Note that Spotlight will still do a full reindexing of your drive. Make sure that there's sufficient free space for this plus any potential paging activity on that drive.

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-123403.html

If you don't use Spotlight, you might as well turn it off.

pvik00

Simple solution via terminal (10.5):
http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/22/how-to-completely-disable-spotlight/

There is some purpose-built app to help you with this but I don't recall the name.

You can also try Lingon if you know what you are doing:
http://www.maciverse.com/tag/slow-mac-spotlight-lingon

Do note that re-enabling Spotlight triggers an implicit re-indexing which may run for hours, so there's really no point in turning it on and off frequently.

eurotrotter

thanks for that,

i got as far as step 4, but then when i went into step 5, i copied and pasted the code nto terminal and it said something about the directory not being found or something, but i rebooted anyway, and spotlight isnt working but the icon for spotlight is still in the top right hand corner, but i think she has cooled down a bit so hopefully that did the trick

thanks very much!

ed

pvik00

No worries.
I use Spotlight quite often and I wouldn't disable it.

Instead I recommend just dropping it's index and letting the OS to recreate it from scratch.
That usually resolves the permanent reindexing problem.

If you ever turn it back on, first be sure to remove the index from all volumes and allow for sufficient time/hdd space for it to get recreated. Until then your Mac can run hot and be unresponsive.

eurotrotter

thanks for the help
wats involved in recreating an index from scratch
what kinda space is needed?

pvik00 wrote: »

No worries.
I use Spotlight quite often and I wouldn't disable it.

Instead I recommend just dropping it's index and letting the OS to recreate it from scratch.
That usually resolves the permanent reindexing problem.

If you ever turn it back on, first be sure to remove the index from all volumes and allow for sufficient time/hdd space for it to get recreated. Until the your Mac can run hot and be unresponsive.

Sad Professor

Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab

Drag or add your hard drive to the list. Then remove it.

Spotlight will then start re-indexing everything. Click on Spotlight in the menu-bar to see its progress. Let it finish, don't close the lid, sleep, shutdown etc. Interruptions tend to cause the problem you were experiencing.

eurotrotter

when i click on add it allows me to choose the mac drive, but it dont add anything to the list, any ideas?

my mac is still running hot though even though i disabled spotlight, fiddlesticks

Sad Professor wrote: »

Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy tab

Drag or add your hard drive to the list. Then remove it.

Spotlight will then start re-indexing everything. Click on Spotlight in the menu-bar to see its progress. Let it finish, don't close the lid, sleep, shutdown etc. Interruptions tend to cause the problem you were experiencing.

Sad Professor

Try dragging the HD icon to the list.

eurotrotter

i tried draggin but it does nothing, not happening

Sad Professor wrote: »

Try dragging the HD icon to the list.

pvik00

We need to see why it is running hot.
Can you post another screenshot with of Activity Monitor/CPU usage?

Did you manually remove the Spotlight index directory? If not, it can still be broken.

eurotrotter

pvik00 wrote: »

We need to see why it is running hot.
Can you post another screenshot with of Activity Monitor/CPU usage?

Did you manually remove the Spotlight index directory? If not, it can still be broken.

thanks for that

i attached a screenshot of the activity monitor

ed

triple h

eurotrotter wrote: »

hey gang
hope yer all well

my 2 year old macbook always seems to have the fan on, and its quite loud all the time.

im over in germany and its 22 C here most days, and all i hear is the fan on a lot of the time

im not running that many apps simultaneously either, so not sure what might a brought this on

any ideas?


thanks
ed

Sometimes when my 13" Macbook starts overheating ( that fan drives me mad) this fixes it -- might help you.
1) go to system preferences
2) click the Printer / Fax icon
3) Now go to the left panel and click the printer ( if you are like me you might have a number of printers, i have 3)
4) you will see Open Printer Queue in the center somewhere. Click it.
5) if there are any jobs in the box delete them
6) problem solved.

7) check all the printers if you have a few and delete any jobs that may be in the queue.

pvik00

eurotrotter wrote: »

thanks for that

i attached a screenshot of the activity monitor

ed

It seems healthy.
Just to make sure, can you switch to the CPU tab to reveal overall CPU consumption and sort the results having the highest consumers of CPU on top?