9
I have a MacBook Air with OS X Lion and the fan started running loudly. I presume it is because the system is overheating and would like to determine the cause.
What tool can I use to see what is driving the system to become overheated?
WilliamKF
Posted 2012-05-05T22:57:09.510
Reputation: 6 916
10
The fan is turning on because the CPU is being taxed. You can look at what processes are using the CPU with Activity Monitor:
Activity Monitor is a built-in application. Type "Activity Monitor" into Spotlight and it should be the first result.
nc4pk
Posted 2012-05-05T22:57:09.510
Reputation: 8 261
1
Activity Monitor defaulted to show only "My Processes". None of those seemed to be the source of the problem.
However, when I switched the Activity Monitor view to "All Processes" Carbonite was the clear culprit. About 60 seconds after I set Carbonite to "Pause for 24 hours" its CPU utilization dropped to < 1% and my annoyingly loud fan slowed down then stopped.
I'm only using Carbonite, because I had a few months left on my old license, but I'm not sure its worth listening to a noisy fan for hours on end while it trickles my bits to the cloud.
Mark
Posted 2012-05-05T22:57:09.510
Reputation: 11
1thanks. I just checked my Activity monitor for the same issue. Firefox was using 85% of my Macbook OSX Lion's CPU. After closing it, it took a minute or two but then the fan stopped. – tim peterson – 2012-08-02T01:14:51.647