2011 MBA at 88 C for cpu i5.

[waloshin]

Weird burning smell coming from MBA:

Cpu is almost idle,but the temp is so high and so are the fans.

 

[Skoopman]

Did you take a look at the activity monitor to see what application is causing this? Maybe the kernel task is on killing spree, some MBA's have that problem.

 

[waloshin]

Did you take a look at the activity monitor to see what application is causing this? Maybe the kernel task is on killing spree, some MBA's have that problem.

 

[Skoopman]

That looks like the problem, the kernal task shouldn't go above 2% without a reason. Can you take a look at the temperatures and also printscreen the console log? Maybe we can find the issue there.

 

[xinu]

Weird burning smell coming from MBA:

Image

Cpu is almost idle,but the temp is so high and so are the fans.

Your CPU usage is 36% in that screenshot so it is not idling.
My quess is that mds but it can be finder or safari too.

http://osxdaily.com/2010/08/05/mds-mac/ mds – what MDS process is and why it uses CPU on the Mac

Safari uses lots of CPU when it makes those history web-page previews. And there is no easy way to turn it off, use Firefox or Chrome instead.

If you open some video file directory with Finder, it will immediately start making preview icons of those video files. Some OS X genius coders have got a great marvelous amazing idea that they wont use any database for those video icons, they just do them over and over and over again every time you open that same directory with Finder. Disgusting.