MBA Fan...What's Up...

I have a (November) 2012 MBA with 8 GB RAM, a 256 GB SSD and a 128 GB microSD...battery health is 86% while the cycle count is 76.

I have never -- and I do mean never - heard the fan in the past...I have noticed over the last few days that the fan is no kicking in regularly noting that I have not changed the type of work that I do on the MBA which is essentially accounting, web browsing and word processing.

I would like to know i) why all of a sudden the fan has started kicking in and ii) what, if anything, this means about my MBA.

Would you have any ideas or thoughts?


Joel

s15119 said:

When I hear my fan come on I go to Activity Monitor to see if there is an application using a lot of resources for some reason. I find Chrome is frequently a pig and every slows down when I quit Chrome.

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Excellent idea, I will definitely do that...any other ideas out there?

Atomic Walrus said:

A rogue process wasting CPU time is most likely, but it's also possible that you've accumulated enough dust in the machine that it's limiting air flow. Very easy to clean out if that's the case, but requires removing the bottom panel.

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Newtons Apple said:

I 2nd the cleaning. Dust can get on the leading edges of the fan and make it work twice as hard to move the same air. Might not solve the problem if it is software related but it never hurts to have the fan clean so it run as efficient as possible!

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Thanks to both, I will clean out the fan and see whether it helps...

Newtons Apple said:

The activity monitor is still worth looking at. Something could be bugging the CPU. Worth looking at.

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Agreed, the next time it happens I will definitely take a look and report back...much thanks...

Mrbobb said:

You should had noted your "normal" operating temperature with one of the utilities so you have a baseline comparison. Mine used to idle 42c, after 2 years has gone up to 47c.

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CPU's current idle temperature is 42c.

Mrbobb said:

But I bet 98% chance, you downloaded something, reconfigure something and now there is a background task(s) running that's using up cpu. Easy enough to check. I always suspect Adobe Flash, there was a reason Jobs hated it.

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Went to activity monitor to see whether there were any background task(s) that were using CPU but could not find any though I did notice an task labelled WindowServer that was at the top of the list.

Would appreciate feedback on the screen shot I attached because I don't really know what to look for.

TIA,

Joel

PS. I don't have Adobe Flash on the MBA!