Mac Mini overheating and shutting down

Is the fan working correctly? Could be a bad temp sensor that's giving false readings and therefore shutting u down.

hot time in the old mini tonight.

i use/support lots of minis, and can tell you that the cooling system is really tight in the older (yours) and even more so the newer intel systems. even if you can't see anything on the back port, i'll bet you a quarter that it's full of dust as what you describe is a classic overheating symptom.

easy solution, take the mini outside (really) and blast it with compressed air. first blast is backwards, into the exit vents on the back. second blast is at the bottom air intake slots around the bottom edge. repeat the steps until nothing else is coming out. really would recommend an air compressor over canned air, as you need the high volume to get a decent clean. trip to a local mechanic and beg/pay to use a blow tool if you don't have any other access.

of course if you are really geeky, just putty knife it apart, clean everything, and then re-assemble!

best of luck.

caloomba said:

My Mac Mini is 1.5Ghz PowerPc G4, 512Mb RAM, running Mac OS X Version 10.5.8. I bought it second hand a couple of years ago and in the past while it's really been playing up a bit.

It first started overheating and shutting down when I was doing really resource intensive stuff - for example, opening a large amount of RAW image files

Click to expand...

This is a bad combination. With that little RAM it will use more disk cache, which might attribute to the overheating problem.

Are you sure it is overheating?

My G4 just shuts off (not shut down or sleep) randomly. Thought it was the heat, but opening the case and blowing a fan across it on high didn't help much nor did removing the drives and running off an external FW drive. I just assume it is the motherboard or the shutdown thing Apple fixed with a firmware patch on the very similar laptops.