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

Is one of my fans dead?

B

binaryslyder

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 17, 2007
25
0
So the other day I noticed that my new Macbook (6 months old, 4 gb ram upgrade) was starting to make a bit more noise than normal. Just after starting up, the fans ramped up into high gear. It got so loud that my wife joked that I was about to take off. Since then, the fans appear to be running abnormally high. Now, I turn off my mac whenever I'm not using it, and as far as I can tell, no programs are set to startup with the mac.

I downloaded fancontrol (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23137) to see if that wouldn't help, and it just scared the crap out of me. It said my left fan was spinning at over 6,000 rpm and my right fan was spinning at -1 RPM. So either this program is way off or my mac is lucky to be alive right now.

Any ideas? I could take it down to a mac store near me (about 45 minutes) but what's the turnaround on stuff like this?

Thanks!
 
binaryslyder said:
So the other day I noticed that my new Macbook (6 months old, 4 gb ram upgrade) was starting to make a bit more noise than normal. Just after starting up, the fans ramped up into high gear. It got so loud that my wife joked that I was about to take off. Since then, the fans appear to be running abnormally high. Now, I turn off my mac whenever I'm not using it, and as far as I can tell, no programs are set to startup with the mac.

I downloaded fancontrol (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23137) to see if that wouldn't help, and it just scared the crap out of me. It said my left fan was spinning at over 6,000 rpm and my right fan was spinning at -1 RPM. So either this program is way off or my mac is lucky to be alive right now.

Any ideas? I could take it down to a mac store near me (about 45 minutes) but what's the turnaround on stuff like this?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

It does sound like one of your fans died and the other is trying to compensate for it.

As far as repair time, it all depends on whether the Apple Store you bring it to, does repair on site or sends it to an Apple Repair depot.
 
flopticalcube said:
MacBooks only have 1 fan. MacBook Pros have 2.

Open up Activity Monitor and see what is eating up all your CPU. Its probably spotlight doing some indexing.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info regarding the fans. I just opened up Activity monitor and here are some stats that might help:

CPU usage - User 50% (I'm running firefox, word and Ichat)
System 2%

It looks like the heaviest thing running is spotlight, with 7 threads and about 13mb of my real memory. That hardly seems like it would impact this problem.

Speaking of problems. My battery is dropping quickly. Unplugged with a full charge used to get me 4 hours plus. Now it says I've only got 1 hour 39 minutes (and its fully charged and I know how to handle laptop batteries)

hmmm......
 
Update: Fixed

Blame it on my wife. I went back and double checked my activity monitor to be sure that nothing else was running. Upon the second check I realized that my "show" drop down menu was set to only show me inactive processes. I switched it to all and found that my print job manager was running at damn near 90%. After connecting my laptop to the printer directly, the printer spit out about 10 pages worth of stuff my wife apparently was trying to print a few days ago. As soon as it was done, the fans slowed down instantly. Now my mac is back to its quiet hum and my battery gauge is reading 5+ hours.

Thanks guys for the help. I'll warn the wife next time about leaving the queue open.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back