MBP Temperature/Fanspeed Advice

[CTracer]

Hi,
I can use some advice. I recently picked up a reconditioned MBP (2.6 SR 4gb 160HD) to replace my Dell 1510. Everything was great for 2 weeks, running bootcamp for a few PC programs, web browsing, etc. I never noticed the fan kicking on and it seemed to be running pretty cool despite what I had read about other units. Last night I was playing around with the Quicktime player and was playing a few QT clips - the fans cranked up really high and my fully charged battery lasted less that 1 hour. I downloaded istat pro and noted that my cpu was running at about 65 - 80°C while only running Safari. The fans were ranging from 2000 - 4500 rpm. When I did a stress test on the system using terminal the cpu was cooking at 95 - 99°C with the fans at a constant 6000+ rpm. My old Dell had no problem with any of these tasks - at least the fans would not kick into hyperdrive.

From reading the temperature data on the MBP stress temps in the 90's seem to be pretty rare so I think I have a problem. What would you recommend?

1. Bring the MBP to a genius (have them replace the heat sink compound properly?).
2. Redo the heat sink compound myself
3. Just download a fan controller (although the thought of listening to that fan cranking all the time does not make me happy) and live with the issue.

Thanks for any help.

CTracer

 

[squeeks]

are you sure you are "only running safari" ? there could be another app running thats eating up system resources causeing the heat and draining the battery

thats my theory, if the system isnt crashing its not getting too hot

 

[CTracer]

I checked the activity monitor last night and at first both Quicktime and Fusion were in the dock so I quit them. However, after that the cpu was still around 80°C. I'll do some more investigating tonight.

 

[nikhsub1]

I've replaced the thermal paste on my MBP... it is NOT easy. If you do not KNOW computers well, I would not recommend you doing it yourself. I deal with computers for a living and have probably built over a thousand custom machines, and it made me a bit nervous! If it continues to get hot, take it to the genius bar and have them deal with it.

 

[zamboni52]

I checked the activity monitor last night and at first both Quicktime and Fusion were in the dock so I quit them. However, after that the cpu was still around 80°C. I'll do some more investigating tonight.

Next time it happens again bring up the activity monitor and see what is eating up your CPU cycles. In my case, I only had Safari running an it was using 95% of my CPU time. The fans were running and the laptop was getting hot like I was doing some serious video editing or something. I quit Safari and everything started to cool off almost immediately. It may have been a flash program or java program that was running on the page. It really surprised me because I was only running Safari at the time. Hope this helps.