MBP Running Hot

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Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Melbourne
Hi,

I have a mid-2009 MBP and am noticing it seems to be running a lot hotter than it used to. (and it runs a lot hotter than my work machine which is a i7 MBP with an SSD) The warranty expires in June so keen to do something about it before then.

Has anyone had a similar thing or taken theirs to the Apple store for something like that? or have you indeed re-thermal pasted it yourself? Is it something the Apple store guys are likely to acknowledge and address? Both the fans seem fine and the laptop is not really very dusty inside at all.

Thanks
 
I had a similar problem on an old MBP 2006 and the cause was a failed fan. You could install fan control or istat menus to control temps, they would also tell you if the fan has failed. About this mac may also tell you if a fan has failed. Fans are available from the auction site and reasonably easy to fit, but as you have warranty check if you have a failed fan first.
 
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Book an appointment at your local apple store and they can run diagnostics on the machine for you to determine if a fan is behaving incorrectly.

If you don't want to faff about yourself :p
 
Aha! Mine (Mid 2009) did this too a few weeks ago and there's a thread I started here somewhere....It did it for about 24hrs then stopped and is back to normal. The fans were going full pelt to keep it cool. The CPU was constantly at 100% utilization even from a restart. Then just after I posted it stopped!?
 
Take the back off (assuming you dont have apple care or anything) and the fan is held in by 3 screws, take it out and clean the nice thick blanket of dust from the cooling fins :p

Mines the same age and was running hotter than usual, it had been doing it gradually over time though.

This is all assuming the fan isnt failed, or any other fault though. Is it running OK otherwise?

edit; just seen you've got a warranty, so might be wise to get apple to do it!
 
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We have this issue with our 2010 mbp 13" 2.66 model. Usually happens if your watching YouTube or have lots of browser windows open. It doesn't seem to happen when you have a DVD or mkv playing, so I'm guessing it's some weird loading base on how certain apps run ...
I might give this fan cleaning a go tonight, do I need silly screwdrivers ?
 
Fan will Almost certainly be clogged up inside if it's never been cleaned before

My old black book looked pretty clean inside till I took the fan out and pulled out chunks of compressed dust that looked sponge like
 
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If it's under load and isn't shutting down, there isn't much to worry about.

If it's getting that hot on idle, then something is going wrong somewhere, either fan or thermal paste, or even a process eating up CPU, check Activity Monitor and select all process from the drop list.
 
"andy" said:
Fan will Almost certainly be clogged up inside if it's never been cleaned before

My old black book looked pretty clean inside till I took the fan out and pulled out chunks of compressed dust that looked sponge like
Click to expand...

This is probably what he has, most laptops also suffer from this problem but thanks to the good build quality of the macs its easy to remove a few screws and unclog the heat sink. This will make a huge difference in temps
 
My mid 2009 C2D MBP is doing this again!? CPU is over 50% utilization with Directory Services chewing up 97% of the CPU cycles. It stops if I restart the machine but then comes back after a short while.

Any ideas?
 
Bumping this as its happening more frequently now.
Sitting with a couple of Tabs open in Chrome working on a Word Document and the CPU is at 50+% constantly. Directory Services taking up 98% of the CPU cycles.
 
Doublecheese, does this happen if you just boot up your system and leave it for a while to do it's thing? If it does, can you boot to the install DVD, and just leave it on the welcome screen for a bit, see if the same thing happens temp wise. Best to eliminate anything software related. Unlikely that it will be the case, but better to eliminate it before you go see the folks at Apple as they will likely tell you to do the same.
 
@stevey3d - Yes I have it installed! I'm not 100% sure it happens every single time I use Kies or not. Will test. Is this a known issue? Is there a fix?

@dav3evans - I haven't tried that. Will do & report back.

@MagicBoy - no & no.

I took a couple of screen shots that I'll post later. Battery life is shocking while its doing this!
 
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