Late 2008 MacBook Withering?

[willrucker]

I have been browsing for over a week how to fix this problem, sorry if I could not find a solution on this forum thus making this post a repost. I purchased my macbook Late 2008. It is the 2.0 GHZ Unibody model. It has been working fine up until the past couple months. It seems like things that it used to do easily is now taking more effort. Today was the turning point when I was editing a video in iMovie 09'. I was converting a basic 11 second clip so I could speed it up. It usually took me about 30 seconds or less to do that judging from recent videos I edited months prior to this. I waited about 15-20 minutes and it was still converting the 11 second clip! I downloaded a temperature measuring program. The top temperature reached 90 degrees before the fan started to kick in. I will include a picture of the consistent temp after the fans kicked in. The only thing that I can really think of that would do this is recently I have been plugging in my MacBook to my 32" LCD TV via the DVI-HDMI cables and watching 100s of episodes of Television shows stored on my Mac HD. I have reset the SMC. I wouldn't be worried much about this, but it is the fact that my mac can't do the simple things it could do several months ago. I will also note that it gets very hot in the upper center (Right under the macbook logo or under the F6 and F7 keys.) Another thing you might say is that I was doing a process which involved rigorous work on the CPU, but just yesterday I was browsing the web and it heated up again. I check the on the CPU and RAM and saw that the RAM had more the half-a-gig free and the CPU had over 80% Idle.

 

[spinnerlys]

The screenshot you show us, tells us that the CPU is currently used 80%, thus the high temperature is expected, if the CPU is used that much for a longer time.

Open Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor (or use Spotlight to find it) and select to SHOW ALL PROCESSES and sort by CPU, so that the process using the most of the CPU is at the top.

Maybe make a screenshot of it and post it here.

 

[willrucker]

The screenshot you show us, tells us that the CPU is currently used 80%, thus the high temperature is expected, if the CPU is used that much for a longer time.

Open Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor (or use Spotlight to find it) and select to SHOW ALL PROCESSES and sort by CPU, so that the process using the most of the CPU is at the top.

Maybe make a screenshot of it and post it here.

It is strange though that my MacBook never used to do this and now its an everyday occurrence that it heats when doing tasks it used to tackle over in the future. I just find it extremely odd it can't convert an 11 second clip in iMovie 09' at the speed it used to just several months ago. I am worried that I put too much stress on the CPU and Video Card when watching 5 hours worth of TV shows in one sitting. Maybe my MacBook is just getting old which is a shame because I'm waiting to purchase a MB Pro when they come out with a new line.
SCREENSHOT:

 

[spinnerlys]

Sort by CPU, not Real Memory.

Btw, how much HDD space is left out of how much capacity?

And that Mac should be able to do the tasks you previously did in the time you experienced before. Maybe you use a different format with your source videos than before?

Have you tried MPEG Streamclip for conversion to .mov (QuickTime) using the Apple Intermediate Codec and then used the "Move files" instead of the "Copy files" command?

How much HDD space does the iMovie project(s) take away on your Mac, or do you use an external HDD to store and work with your videos?

Btw, for your screenshot, the Activity Monitor window does not have to be that wide.

 

[willrucker]

Sort by CPU, not Real Memory.

Btw, how much HDD space is left out of how much capacity?

And that Mac should be able to do the tasks you previously did in the time you experienced before. Maybe you use a different format with your source videos than before?

Have you tried MPEG Streamclip for conversion to .mov (QuickTime) using the Apple Intermediate Codec and then used the "Move files" instead of the "Copy files" command?

How much HDD space does the iMovie project(s) take away on your Mac, or do you use an external HDD to store and work with your videos?

Btw, for your screenshot, the Activity Monitor window does not have to be that wide.

Sorry about the screen shot
I was using a .mp4 in iMovie 09' so that could've been it...I am using that linked software you posted to convert it to quicktime format so it'll be easier to use in iMovie 09'...I will say that I am using footage captured with an HDPVR from my Xbox 360. Could it be that those are the type of files that slow down iMovie?

Also I have used 60 Gigs of my 120 GB HD. I only have 2 Gigs of RAM seeing as I have a early unibody model. Maybe boosting it to 4 gigs will keep the heat away.

 

[trayanscragg]

something must be hogging your CPU up other than imovie..

 

[ahm]

If it's not the file size of the particular video you're working with, or maybe the file format or the codec... have you checked your paging? (Activity Monitor>System Memory) Excessive page outs can bog down performance and even cause kernel panics. (read)

I really feel like it's the file you're editing though.

 

[willrucker]

If it's not the file size of the particular video you're working with, or maybe the file format or the codec... have you checked your paging? (Activity Monitor>System Memory) Excessive page outs can bog down performance and even cause kernel panics. (read)

I really feel like it's the file you're editing though.

Thanks for the reply. I read that article and kind of get it. I will post a screen shot to show my Current memory. At the time this was taken I was running Microsoft word, mac mail, and safari in the background.

 

[ahm]

Sorry, a more accurate reading to check your RAM I guess would be to use the terminal (again) and type "top" (without quotations). The number of page outs inside the parenthesis are what you should be looking at

Here's an excerpt from The X Lab

Now note the pageins and pageouts in the last or VM (virtual memory) line:

11747(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

The numbers before the parentheses, 11740 and 0 in this example, indicate the total pageins and pageouts, respectively, performed since this Mac was last restarted. Over time, both numbers will increase. If the total pageouts is low — ideally 0 — compared to the number of pageins after having used your Mac for hours of work, you may have sufficient RAM. Otherwise, you should install more RAM.

The numbers within the parentheses are the most important: these indicate the number of pageins or pageouts performed in the last one second. If these values — especially pageouts — are consistently in the range of 25 to 50 or more, then the system is thrashing: paging excessively as it is starved for RAM at its current workload. Overall performance will slow as the CPU spends more time paging than on other work. If your Mac is thrashing, you need to install more RAM!

But.. that being said, isn't video converting more processor intensive than memory intensive? Have you tried converting various types of video files to see if you keep running into the same problem?