Macbook Fan Noise

[anotherarunan]

My white Santa Rosa 2.2ghz late 2007 macbook over the last few months has been getting worse and worse with its fan noise.

Currently, I have have this tab and another on the BBC News homepage (flash blocked) open in firefox writing this up, and according to istat my fans are running at around the 6100rpm mark with my CPU temp around 65 c.

Have tried and SMC reset, and hasnt fixed it. Not really sure what else to do? Checked the activity monitor and nothing else seems to be using more than 7-10% of CPU.

Not really sure what else to do?! Please help!

 

[Yaboze]

I have a Brother network printer and that's what was causing it for me, the driver was causing a service to throttle the CPU.

In the past, some Dashboard widgets were doing it.

Check the running processes to see what process has a high CPU utilization and go from there.

(Utilities > Activity Monitor)

 

[anotherarunan]

I have a Brother network printer and that's what was causing it for me, the driver was causing a service to throttle the CPU.

In the past, some Dashboard widgets were doing it.

Check the running processes to see what process has a high CPU utilization and go from there.

(Utilities > Activity Monitor)

Thanks, but there is nothing throttling the CPU - with my usage (browsing non flash sites, PDFs, word docs) it hardly ever goes above 20% if that.

I have come to the conclusion that it must be dust on the fans and/or heatsink. If anyone has any experience of cleaning out their MB/MBP's of dust - please share!

 

[bobfitz14]

If anyone has any experience of cleaning out their MB/MBP's of dust - please share!

i second this request. can't say i'm having fan throttling issues at the moment with my 2010 mbp 13" luckily but just for future reference it can't hurt to know how to clean up the fans from dust etc.

 

[blackburn]

I've had issues with dust. Dust tends to get trapped in the heat sink fins. In my macbook it's easy to remove the fan and remove the dust that got trapped. In yours it's a little bit trickier

But your cpu is rather cool for the fan speed. maybe something else is overheating or an heat senor is disconnected. Since that fan speed should only be reached if the cpu was at 80~90ºC

 

[anotherarunan]

I've had issues with dust. Dust tends to get trapped in the heat sink fins. In my macbook it's easy to remove the fan and remove the dust that got trapped. In yours it's a little bit trickier

But your cpu is rather cool for the fan speed. maybe something else is overheating or an heat senor is disconnected. Since that fan speed should only be reached if the cpu was at 80~90ºC

I have a bad feeling its getting warmer and warmer though. Right now its at the 65-73C mark and again maxed out at 6200rpm.

My 3yr applecare ran out last month! So would like to at least try and clean out the dust and do any basic maintenence to whatever I can do. Whilst I can change the RAM/HD pretty easily - never opened up my macbook casing - so not really sure what to look for - and precisely - what does the heatsink look like? And where is it located!?