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PowerBook Overheating?

C

Cypher3

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 13, 2004
110
0
After using my laptop for a few hours at a time, it starts to get realllly sluggish and gets real warm, almost hot. This happens after running safari and AIM for like 4 or 5 hours at a time. All of my programs run slow and the beach ball pops up often. Is there anything I can do to prevent this? And on another note, lately my iChat has been acting weird, like when I start it up it doesnt organize the names into order like it normally does, it just has random names in bold (online) and thats it. And another thing..lol..I can only get about 2:30 hours battery life on my 12" PB with dim screen and reduced proc speed and everything. Anything I should try to optimize my battery life? Sorry for the multiple one questions in one thread, just figured its easy all in one thread than making three separate ones.

Thanks
 
It sounds like you might be running a run-away process or something with a memory leak. That would explain the slowness (lots of disk-swapping, which leads to lower battery life) and the constant CPU usage would cause the heat and general slowness. Next time you notice it start to happen, launch Terminal and use the top command. Look through and see how much % idle you have and if that is very low, look for the process taking the most CPU time.
 
Kernel_Task uses the most, using 63 mb of ram and has 40 threads. Is that normal?
 
Sounds like it. Mirror agent has the most threads at 48, but I don't even have that Kernel thing. You have a run away program.

EDIT: There it is under all processes, yep, got about the same as you.
 

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Oh ok. Thanks. Just one more thing, I have 3.10 Gb of Virtual Memory and that kernal_task is using 900+ MB of Virtual Memory, not to mention all of my other programs are using a lot as well. Is that normal? If not how can I lower it? That could have something to do with low battery life as well right?
 
Cypher3 said:
Oh ok. Thanks. Just one more thing, I have 3.10 Gb of Virtual Memory and that kernal_task is using 900+ MB of Virtual Memory, not to mention all of my other programs are using a lot as well. Is that normal? If not how can I lower it? That could have something to do with low battery life as well right?
Click to expand...

How much ram do you have? 256 is low... if you're doing a lot of browsing that would cause OS X to write to the page file... or swap space basically... causing your computer to be slow and heat up a bit due to that..
 
Perhaps you should download and install MenuMeters. It gives a roughly real-time indication of your RAM and CPU usage, and is very unobtrusive.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10451

When you notice your computer slowing down, check out that CPU number (and the RAM as well)...the other info in this thread will help diagnose what is causing the slowdown, but you may be able to figure it out by just monitoring your computer as you use it.

Your battery life seems a little low, which may indicate that your computer is working unnecessarily hard.
 
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