MacBook Air Fan Running Constantly

mine running at 2499 browsing this forum - silent

I had this problem and checked the Activity Monitor. For some reason, the Finder was taking up 100% of the CPU resources. I force quitted it and it's gone back to purring almost inaudibly.

However, the Finder never seemed to actually quit. Maybe it switches itself back on automatically - I'm not sure - but maybe it was something else. maybe I had two Finders or something equally odd.

This was in a 22 degree environment. I hope this is software not hardware as I shudder to think what will happen in Summer...

- Joel Fagin

I have two one week 5 and one week 11, the week 11 the fans almost never run higher then 2500 even watching utube...the week 5, was always kicking up...to 6200

like this one much better..:)

Well, I updated all my Mac components (included 10.5.2) but my fan works constantly at 6200 RPM... And that's quite annoying...

I guess the problem is in a recent update, because when I unpaccked my MBA eveerything was fine...

Anyone know how to decrease RPM to an acceptable value (4000 RPM) or any incoming fix?

I have a MBA 1.8/80HDD and indeed the fan was spinning all day on 6200rpm (top) with practical no CPU load. SMC resets and the like didn't work. I got a case number from Apple Care and was about to turn it in.

Then it occurred to me that the fan was only doing this at home on my desk. There it is always connected to an extended Cinema Display. When monitoring the heat with Hardware Monitor I found that when the extended display was plugged in, the temperature would go up with about 2-5 degrees celcius.

When disconnected the MBA fan is behaving quite nice. Mostly around 2500rpm. Sometimes kicking on for a short while.

This is most probably normal behavior and is a full spinning fan the only outcome when connected. I will try next week a IXoft cooling pad.

Mine did the same. The genius replaced my Macbook air apprxo. 3 weeks ago. The new one is fine..

Thanks for the tip/nudge about the activity monitor 🙂

After 2 weeks of quiet running, my airbook started running its fan on high, last night and this morning. I checked the Activity Monitor (sorted on CPU) and found that Apimac CleanText was running wild and sure enough needed a force-quit. The second highest CPU usage was Dashboard, where I had PlasmaTube installed, so I deactivated that. The fan continued to run for a short time then slowed down and effectively stopped (I can't hear it at all now).

It was probably more the CleanText hyperactivity that was making the fan run -- don't know why, as I've often left it open over a couple of days, without any problem.

I had the same issue...fans going nuts for seemingly no reason. I've had the MBA since release (1.8Ghz SSD), and it was never this bad. Only recently did the fans become unbearable. Apple Store ran hardware test for 21 hours and everything passed. They said it was software related (oh, and the engineers were 'working on it'), so they downgraded my OS from 10.5.2 to 10.5.1, and guess what?

Problem fixed!!!

If you have an MBA, do all the updates except 10.5.2, and you'll be fine...if not, you have a hardware issue.

Day three of running on 10.5.1 and no issues now whatsoever.

Hope this helps all those that were going nuts like I was.

MBAs are the POS of the Apple world.
Almost enough to go back to WinTel if I didn't know better (owning 2 other, well behaved, MACs).

The darn fan never runs lower than 6000 rpm. Plus the performance is poor - relative to a 2GHz, 1GB iMac.

This is my 2nd MBA and the problems are consistently the same. We should all request a refund or credit to upgrade to a MacBook Pro.

The MBA is not currently fit for purpose.

I've come to a conclusion that the reason my MBA fan is running at high speed some times is that when I run multiple applications and that my battery is changing at the same time, that the sensor from the CPU fan is picking up heat from both battery and CPU. So the fan is trying to cool the entire compartment so that the CPU wont burnt out.

Sorry, on my previous post, I ment to say charging and not changing. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that the fan did slow down once the compartment got cooler.

To me, something very strange (and incomprehensible) happened.

I was having the same problem with my Macbook Air. I would turn it on, and the fan would start at 2,400 rpm, and then steadily climb up to 6,200 rpm and then stay there.

Since it was a Saturday and no way to contact Apple, I wondered if I could do some home repair (dumb idea, but more on this later).

So, flipped over the MBA, unscrewed all the screws and lifted up the bottom. A quick examination taught me two things:
1) I don't know what I'm doing
2) I should screw everything back on as soon as possible.

So I performed #2 with great enthusiasm, and turned the MBA back on.

Strangely enough, since then, the fan is staying at 2,505 rpm. Normal for the temperature and the CPU usage.

Did I just perform a miracle or did I invite a disaster? Or is this a divine intervention?

I would love to know what to do. Some of the posts suggest that this is a software problem (e.g., didn't have the problem before upgrade to 10.5.2), others suggest that it is an applications problem, and others report a hardware problem that is solved by replacing the MBA or messing with that thermal paste.

What's the final word here? Is a firmware upgrade on the horizon? Should I get in line at the Apple store and insist on a replacement? Is 6200rpm normal?

My fan is also stuck at 6200rpm with no applications running, the only solution is to shut it down but when I power it on again and run Safari for a while and then close it the fan again sticks at 6200rpm.

life4rent wrote:
run Safari for a while and then close it the fan again sticks at 6200rpm.

Safari can use a lot of cpu if you have web pages with animations (ads) open. I know that certain web pages can make the fan run crazy even if they just run in a tab in the background. However, this is also true for my MacBook and PC laptops (though more so for MBA).