SoftwareUpdateCheck process won't quit - hogs processor

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Level 1

13 points

SoftwareUpdateCheck process won't quit - hogs processor

Hi All,

Just gave my wife a new MacBook for Xmas last month and it has the strangest bug. SoftwareUpdateCheck seems to run in the background endlessly and even when quitting it from Activity Monitor, it reappears. I've already noted the difficulty of storing packages and running the updates and such, and we definitely had that issue on her MacBook (in which data was migrated from her iBook), but eventually got the updates to stick.

Does anyone know what is causing this or how to disable the process so the MacBook can sleep and have processor time for other things? Her OS is totally up to date and I'm wondering how to squash this bug.

Thanks!

Mick

MBP 2.4ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jan 3, 2008 8:34 AM

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Answer 1

SimplyMac

Level 4

2,508 points

Jan 3, 2008 11:12 AM in response to Mick Guinn

Mick,

You said that you migrated some stuff from her iBook? So you have gone from G4 PPC land to Intel.

Well that sounds like part of the problem right there. If you migrated some important saved documents over then that is fine. But its been a recurring thing on here for people who have migrated Programs and Apps too through the "update" or "migrate" process to have issues.

I personally just bought a MacBook Pro last week. As with any new Mac, I always save the documents that are "keepers" (like photos, documents, music, etc..) to a external drive, then I wipe that shiny new Mac's hard drive and do a clean install. It seems to eliminate most of the potential issues.

Another thing is make sure that you replace or upgrade any software you have to Universal binaries. If you are running old PPC apps or if some PPC stuff got migrated to the new machine, it will be running under Rosetta and that will be slow, and eat the processor.

HTH.

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Answer 2

Mick Guinn Author

Level 1

13 points

Jan 3, 2008 11:42 AM in response to SimplyMac

Hi SM,

Thanks for the reply. There were no applications migrated, just the User data. All apps were installed cleanly on a brand new INTEL system. Everything is a Universal Binary and the system is as clean as I know how to make one. But there is still some strange bug in there. I'm wondering if I should toss the SoftWare Update prefs and see if that helps.

Other ideas welcome.

cheers,

Mick

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Answer 3

Feb 22, 2008 11:11 AM in response to Mick Guinn

Hello, guys...
Just ran into the same problem. SoftwareUpdateCheck would run at 99% CPU usage 24/7. It would not stop hogging CPU. I opened a terminal window and did the following from command line.

ps -ef | grep SoftwareUpdate
kill -9 <PID>

Basically, we're just killing the process from the command line instead of the activity monitor.
When the SoftwareUpdateCheck process was killed, it attempted to restart. When it did restart, it informed me that it needed to update my BIOS. It updated my BIOS, and I restarted my MacBookPro. The process is no longer running.
Hopefully, this will help anyone else who has run into the same problem.

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