MACBOOK PRO & SNOW LEOPARD - OVERHEATING

Mine's doing the same thing... too hot to touch... it's gotta be doing damage to the insides being that hot...

What's the fix here, Apple?

Apple aren't here but my MacBook Pro is cool as cucumber and the fan only comes on when I start flogging the CPU over 50% doing video conversion.

41 degrees C and 2001 rpm at the moment 🙂

I don't believe it even if I see it.

I've been checking other forums/blogs... looks like this is a substantial issue for a lot of people right now. Many seem to be running much hotter and depleting their battery much faster.

It's not even just a couple degrees warmer... it's very hot to the touch...

I have to say that I also experience just about everything listed so far... Overheats rapidly, hot to the touch, overheats enough to shut down, battery life is impaired....

This happened with a previous version as well... Patience? Oven mitts?

I am running SL on an early '08 MBP and am not having any heat issues. I also note that I have never installed the SMC firmware update 1.3 that had to do with speeding up the fans under heavy workloads - and I don't intend to. Initially after I installed SL I did notice the machine getting hot a few times but that was the result of the flash plugin for Safari pegging the CPU to 100% at some web sites; killing the flash plug-in or closing those sites solved the problem.

FOund out mine was overheating due to a weird font issue with Snow Leopard... the font cache for office was causing my CPU to run at top level and was heating my computer to almost 180 degrees and draining the battery. Haven't figured out how to remedy it (without simply not using office), but when I deleted the cache, my overheating issue stopped... weird.

Alot of blogs are talking about this weird cache font glitch with Snow Leopard. Worth looking into...

Same here. Fans almost constantly in the 4000-6000rpm range, with minimal usage. This is terribly annoying... :-\

I thought 10.6.1 might help but it hasnt.

My specs from System Profiler:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP31.0070.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.16f11

I have found that mine even runs the fans while mostly sleeping. I have tried adjusting the power settings and everything and the only way to make the darn thing quiet again is to turn it off. I have also found that (probably due to the heat) my system freezes regularly. Frequently while I'm remotely file-sharing which requires a reboot to correct. Oh and mine is hot all the way to the front of the machine.

I just ran Software Update to verify everything is up to date:

"Software Update doesn’t have any new software for your computer at this time."

When I have my computer plugged in I normally have it set to "never sleep" while still putting the display to sleep. This has resulted in a system that is blowing its fans even while not engaged in anything. With only Safari open for example, my fans sound like they're blowing at 100%. It's irritating at the least. I mean, with a game sure, but with just the OS and a browser?

What is Apple doing with all the extra processing that has to be going on? I've checked Activity Monitor and nothing looks to be out of the ordinary. CPU usage is what I'd expect it to be with just an OS and a browser (nearly nothing). In fact, activitymonitord is the highest running process at 3.9% (at its highest).

So in a nutshell, none of you are the only people experiencing this. The question I have is, how long do we wait for a correction and, is Apple going to pretend it (and/or we) don't exist?

Bizarre. It seems that in the last couple of days the overheating problem reduced. I have been at the computer for a couple of hours now, browsing Facebook and so various videos and the temp doesn't go above 55 C.

Same here - 2007 Macbook Pro - fully up to date software. Fan on full - esspecially when using flash web pages. Never did it prior to Snow.

Hi,

Got a late 2007 MacBook and it is definitely running hotter than before with SL, fans always seem to be on. I notice it particularly when time machine starts backing up to my time capsule.

chiming in here... my computer MBP (late 2008) 2.53Ghz, 4GB ram, was NEVER hot to the touch and i RARELY ever heard my fans. now fans are on all the time and my computer is unbearably hot. I can't let it sit on my lap anymore in fear of permanently hurting myself.

smsFanControl sure isn't enough. I don't know why I upgraded to SL. I was a windows user until late 2008 and I really didn't have any issues at all with windows (xp). I switched because of Logic Pro, that's it. I normally don't upgrade anything but I thought, rather naïvely, that Apple at least wouldn't make their next OS worse than the one before (like MS did with VISTA). Big mistake. I'll wait one more week and if there's no official news on this issue I'll return SL (you can do that here in Sweden according to our law) and I'll downgrade.

My computer makes roughly about 40dB more noise than my old PC (midi tower) at this moment. Total misery.

Same specs, same problem! A restart with Shift key down into Safe boot mode does not exibit the problem. But boot back into user mode, and away we go again! Hot and fast fan. Let's hope a fix is on the way.