Macbook Air core Shutdown on video

My fathers Macbook Air works flawlessly. My Uncle's not so much. He can not iChat with us without losing a core at some point.

Last night while talking with my Uncle, my dad checked his average load in iStat pro. His were 1.35 - 1.26 - 1.40 My Uncle's were 6.30 - 10.45 - 5.30.......

Both had iChat and Safari open, nothing else.

Hi everybody,

Here you'll find the answer to what is happenig, unfortunately you won't find the solution to the problem:
http://brettpeters.org/log/2008/04/09/the-core-shutdown-featureflaw.html

As you can read in the post, the core shutdown is the normal behavior of Santa Rosa processors, so it isn't a flaw. The problem is that the SO is not prepared to deal with only one core, and this is why the UI starts to flick and becomes unusable.

The use of CoolBook won't solve the core shutdown, but will keep your AIR working longer before it happens.

What I've done to prevent it is use one of those laptop cooling platforms, the summer in Spain is hot as ****, and the AIR was overheating after 1 hour of normal work.

Alex.

Are there core shutdown issues on Bootcamp???

This just started happening to me (or maybe I just started noticing it). I was watching a TV Show on iTunes at full screen and it started to skip frames and have general slowness. I went to the desktop to open up the Activity Monitor but navigating the desktop folders seemed to be challenging for the MBA to handle. Is this the same type of issue that people are experiencing? Or does my issue sound different?

I even tried closing all open applications but this continued.

What you are seeing is the famous core shutdown.

I think that the problem is with the processor chip because when it detects the overheating of itself, it shuts down one core to lowers its voltage and frequency to avoid self destruction, but this would normally happens if the machine is not placed in a right position like on a pillow or on your lap, specifically for this machine, you need to secure the best air circulation you can, besides that it's pretty obvious that the MacBook Air is not a machine for editing, it's for watching, it's very portable for mobile business users and c.e.os, careful & simple use, that's it.

I updated to 10.5.5 since it claimed to address this video playback issue on the MBA. So far, the video on an iTunes tv show that I'm watching is actually playing even MORE choppy and the overall computer is operating much slower than it had before the update. I'm at a loss of what to do. I've already contacted Apple support about this issue, but they gave me a hard time because I have not yet purchased Apple Care. Here I was thinking that the item was covered for a year.

I agree. I tried to watch the presidential debate live on my Air. First I watched nytimes.com. That worked reasonably well; it seems like when I disconnected the power cord the Air kept cooler, and kernel_task stayed subdued and I could watch the video smoothly. However, at some point nytimes.com stopped playing. I switched to msnbc.com. That made things ground to a halt. After 5 minutes kernel_task went crazy, and the video stream was reduced to a series of still images with sound. I bought the Air for my work, and for that it mostly works, but I still find it unacceptable that you cannot watch video on a new computer. I'm sure that if you buy a cheap Asus Eee PC you can use it to watch video. Then a high end laptop like the air should also be able to handle it.