Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

filmbuff

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 5, 2011
967
364
I've had an issue a few times in the last couple days where my computer will start to get hot while browsing the internet, and drain the battery rapidly. I use Battery Health and normally my MBA draws about 7 watts while browsing in Firefox. When the computer starts to get hot Battery Health shows a drain of ~14 Watts. I've opened activity monitor and there are no programs using an excessive amount of processor - in fact there is hardly any load on the processor at all. Just for good measure I force-quit most of my running apps and the drain came down but only by 0.5 watt. Restarting fixed the problem.

I'm assuming there is some background program (possibly flash) using a lot of graphics power but it is weird that there is no load on the CPU. Has anyone else experienced this? It's a 2012 MBA 13 i5.
 

macdudesir

macrumors 6502
Jan 16, 2011
363
84
Blacksburg, VA
if its getting really hot too, I would say it could be a glitch in OSX i noticed a while ago (it may be fixed now.) that if you woke up the computer on one power source, then changed power sources with a few minutes, it cause it to heat up with no processor usage. Although it probably isn't this, as i noticed it only happened waking up on battery and plugging in. but what you describe is what i saw, and restart did fix it.
 

Bob Coxner

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2011
854
58
I have a 2011 i5 13" MBA with ML. Battery Health shows around 13 watts for me while browsing in Chrome. However, I don't have the heat problem. I'm usually around 43-47C while browsing. If I'm watching Netflix I'm usually around 55-60C.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.