Fusion -WIN7 - High Fan (non-stop)

Your fans are always on when your Mac is on, spinning at a minimum of 1800 rpm. They will spin faster as needed to keep temps at a safe level. If they're spinning up without increased heat, try resetting the SMC. iStat Pro will give you accurate readings of your temps, among other things. Also, make sure you don't block the vents, which are located at the rear, near the hinge.

Websites with Flash content, games and other multimedia apps will put higher demand on the CPU/GPU, generating more heat. This is normal. If you're constantly putting high demands on your system, such as gaming or other multimedia tasks, expect temps to rise and fans to spin up accordingly. It's just your Mac doing its job to maintain temps within the normal range.

I'm running Parallels with Win7 24x7 and have not experienced high fan levels as a result.

I have a mba 13" i7.... and don't run into the fan problem you mention, even when running Fusion with a 3D CAD program and watching netflix.

The only thing I can add is I had a previous, 2009, mba which had a fan noise - which resolved itself after a couple of days (not related to spotlight indexing)... but that noise was noticeable at even low speeds.

best thing you can do is install stat or one of those desktop system monitoring apps (via appstore) and evaluate your fan speeds. other than that... consider swapping out for another one if you are really concerned.

kpdillon said:

Thanks it's calmed way down now. I just wanted to make sure I could use this as a primary machine and not swap it out for a macbook pro. I guess I'll have to see how things go over the next week. As long as the fan doesn't spin loudly all the time, it should be good.

Click to expand...

This isn't MBA specific. VM can be processor intensive, depending on what is happening in the VM - for example, a Virus Scan of the full system is CPU intense for a long time, and will spin the fans.

Your VM will typically perform better if you give it 1 Virtual CPU. Over allocating resources will increase contention and overhead.

I can also see heavy memory swapping within the VM causing CPU load, so you might want to watch Task Manager to see if you need to allocate more RAM to the VM. I have currently allocated 2GB to my Win7 VM, but I have run it with less in the past. I think 1.5GB was the lowest I have used for Win7.

I had similar issue with a converted XP virtual machine with fusion and lion. It was converted from bootcamp on my old MBP. The CPU usage was high and fan is loud even even when it was idle. There are few device drivers weren't installed properly. I am not sure if that cause the issue. So, I did a fresh install of windows 7 pro and assign 1GB memory, 1 core to it. Everything works perfectly. It is so fast and CPU usage is very very low during normal use, even with transparency enabled.