Fans running unusally high, battery life has taken a drastic hit too, WTF???

[Ride9650]

Well, the subject pretty much says it all

Well, all day today, the fans on my mid-2007 Macbook pro have been hovering around the 3000-4000 rpm range, when they normally stay at around 2000 rpms, also my battery life seems to have taken a drastic step for the worst. I can usually pull about 2-3 hours on one charge, but today, it shockingly dropped 50% in just a half hour!

This is all with very minimal application use. I have just been running firefox and Pages all day.

Any idea what could be going on?

The only significant change I made was to partition the hard drive via boot camp so I could install windows and get sling player mobile working, but thats it.... I'm a bit concerned needless to say as I really enjoy this computer and can't really function without it(studying graphic design in college at the moment).

Thanks!

 

[Eidorian]

Taking bets on a runaway process.

Check in Activity Monitor and show All Processes. 5:1 it's a daemon.

 

[Ride9650]

Taking bets on a runaway process.

Check in Activity Monitor and show All Processes. 5:1 it's a daemon.

Thanks for the quick response!

I did think look through Activity monitor already and didn't see anything at first, but I didn't know that I wasn't already looking at all the running processes!

BUT it wasn't a daemon, some process involving my printer somehow got started, despite not having printed anything today and was taking up 99% of the CPU!

 

[Eidorian]

Printer services are another common runaway task on OS X. It's more than likely some sort of startup item that monitors your printer.

It's safe to kill if it's gone awry.