Now it's overheating when playing flash video...

[philxthomas]

Wondering if anyone can help me from smashing my MacBook with a big hammer...

I bought this new macbook pro 13' a few months back and upgraded to Lion right away and all was good. Yesterday I decided to do a fresh re-install of snow leopard on it as an older machine running SL seemed to run faster than my mac.

Since installing the older OS, things do seems to be running faster, but now it overheats when playing flash video. The bottom gets hot and the fan speeds up to an extremely irritating volume. It never did this until now. Now it's acting like a 5 year old plastic macbook.

It's really annoying me as one of the main reasons I got the new macbook was to end this problem.

I can't think what has changed and caused this since the re-install, lost some graphics drivers or something??. I will try upgrading to Lion again too but can't right now because of massive problems with my apple id, it has been disabled apple.

Any ideas?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example

Further reading:

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Making The Most of Activity Monitor
What Is Activity Monitor (or How to Take Your Mac's Pulse)​

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Adobe Flash Player is CPU intensive, thus more power is needed to feed the CPU, which results in higher temperatures and often higher fan speed(s) on mobile computers. As more power is used due to Flash, the battery life of mobile computers is shortened by a good bit.

There are a variety of Flash blockers for all the four major browsers available.
A Flash blocker does what it says, it blocks Flash content, but via a click on the marked Flash object, the Flash object can be activated and used.

• Safari: ClickToFlash, for which there is an extension and a plug-in; CTF allows you to download YouTube and other kinds of MPEG-4 encoded video too.
• Opera: has a built-in Flash blocker
• Firefox: Flashblock is an add-on to block Flash
• Chrome: FlashBlock is an extension to block Flash

Also make sure to have the latest Adobe Flash Player version running, you can get it here.​

 

[philxthomas]

yep got the latest version of flash player... here is the processes screenshot...

 

[simsaladimbamba]

yep got the latest version of flash player... here is the processes screenshot...

Image

That is Flash for you, and Firefox.
I use Safari and ClickToFlash, but when I use Flash enabled videos, the 2009 MBP I use with 10.6.8 gets hot. That is the nature of Flash. A bolt can reach up to 30.000° C anyway, why not this little piece of crap.

 

[philxthomas]

Yeah, I was hoping to avoid the "that's flash for you" sort of answers. I am aware that flash is utter crap, but the main problem is that the mac has never had trouble with playing video before, so something has obviously changed since the reinstall..

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Yeah, I was hoping to avoid the "that's flash for you" sort of answers. I am aware that flash is utter crap, but the main problem is that the mac has never had trouble with playing video before, so something has obviously changed since the reinstall..

Hmm, does it also happen in Safari?

 

[philxthomas]

Hmm, it appears not, Safari is fine. Maybe some firefox setting then...

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Hmm, it appears not, Safari is fine. Maybe some firefox setting then...

Do you use the latest Firefox version, or even the Beta or even Aurora (which I run without much problems)?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/

 

[philxthomas]

Just updated to latest FF beta, still the same.