Mac OS X Lion heats up my MacBook extremely

Just to give you a little update after yesterday's attempts. I managed to reset PRAM and SMC and now Lion is cool when it's idle! 🙂

For those of you experiencing this high CPU usage, high temperatures or fan speeds, and you are using Carbonite, you may want to try this:

It turns out that under Lion it seems, Carbonite (particularly the process CarboniteDaemon) seems to struggle and force very high CPU usage rates when looking for files to backup that include running programs. By configuring Carbonite to NOT look for files to backup in your "Applications" folder for example, at least for me, I saw dramatically lower CPU rates. You can add folders to be ignored for backup via the "Backup" tab in the Carbonite preferences panel.

Give it a try if you are in this scenario.

I do not have Carbonite.

My hot MBP issue goes away if I 1) turn off Time Machine backups, and 2) eject the Time Capsule drive. My computer runs cool and quiet after this.

I have to manually restart Time Machine once in a while to get a backup.

Evidently, the Spotlight index process is running against the Time Machine backup and it seems never to complete. It seems that Lion and Time Machine/Time Capsule do not get along.

I have try so many method to try to cool down my mbp, and I also experience so many bug which can driving me super mad some time, Lion is good, but I dont think is stable enough. so in the end, I give up, now I am back to snow leopard, and I feel like my mac has never been this cold and fast !!!

I went to the apple shop other day, all the mac book pro in the shop is still running with the os snow leopard, only the mac book air is with the lion. so I guess even the apple people knows the macbook pro still run better with the snow leopard.

I called up to Apple express lane, made a complain, fill the complain form online, now I've got my 20.99 pound back to my bank !!!

sadly ive got a similer problem and im running snow lepard my usaual cpu temp is around 130˚ even right after its been asleep for mabey a day without use

I remember when excessive overheating used to be a Windows-only problem. Now my new PC runs cooler than my MacBook. All Genius Bar will say is that it is still running in a safe range, and if there is an issue it will shut down. Well, my comp has crashed several times from excessive processor use/overheating, so I give up :/

im using istat pro and have it set to run the fan around 2000 rpm at minamum and its only crashed 1 time in the past month so i think its a cpu temp problem and keep in mind im running snow lepard

I've been trying all the solutions listed here with no success until now, with my machine running lion idle as hot as my machine with snow leopard when I was decoding video and battery lasting 50%.

The only one that was left was the UPgrade (for me it is an upgrade!) to Snow Leopard but yesterday i did something that you could try, It is stil hot but now battery seems to last considerably more.

What I did is to stop spotlight and ask him to re-index the boot disk, it seems that it was stuck in an endless indexing loop since I installed lion.

Open terminal, first:

sudo mdutil -i off

then:

sudo mdutil -E /

The it re-indexes the unit. After that my machine seems to have more battery life ant its slightlt colder than before

This solution seems to have worked for me as well. I noticed the mds process was pegging the procersor every 5 seconds or so. After this solution, it seems to be back under control. Thanks for the post.

Wondering if anyone who's posted previously could update since October's release of 10.7.2 for Lion?

I was one of the folks who upgraded my MacBook 2.4GHz/4GB RAM to Lion on the first day of release (10.7.0) and after two weeks of overheating/overactive fans (and subsequent battery life loss) I wiped the drive and reinstalled with Snow Leopard. Has been running great since then.

Now that there's been some time, I'm curious if 10.7.2 has fixed the problem... a search for fans/Lion/heat shows most of the activity on the boards subsiding back in October.

Also, here's a discussion that offered some helpful pointers relating to this issue, for folks who are still having problems with Lion/fans on older Mactops:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194717

Nope, 10.7.2 hasn't solved the underlying issue. Bumped up the ram in my mid-2007 macbook to 3 gigs to no avail. Turning off the extensions helps a lot, but its definitely getting worse. I can barely get through a 22 minute episode on Hulu without the computer heating up ridiculously and then my sound card going haywire. :-/

I'm afraid this situation hit a standstill for the last year or so...10.7.4 still yields the same results on older hardware (MBP 2,2)...anxiously awaiting 10.7.5 in case something happens.

The official answer is that each new operating system (Tiger < Leopard < Snow Leopard < Lion < Mountain Lion) uses more and more resources, and thus runs the processor and other stuff hotter than previous versions. This increased demand for resources is often negligible in newer computers, but in older ones, it can be quite significant. That is why I haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion. Lion was bad enough on my 5 year old MacBook, I think Mountain Lion would put it over the edge and into the junk pile. I'm even debating downgrading if I can find my old disks. I would be able to play my old PowerPC games too, as an added bonus.

No, it's not that. It's an issue with mDNSResponder and an app the works in conjunction with it whose name I can't remember. They are both to do with managing Bonjour services and they take up 100% of the procesing power, not just a bit of extra processing power that you would expect with an OS upgrade. It renders the computer entirely useless unless you can enter Activity Monitor or Terminal and kill the two processes straight away. Most people think it's to do with a corrupted preference file, but I couldn't work out which one. The only thing that fixed it for me was restoring my computer. Mountain Lion has actually been an improvement for me performance-wise, it seems to fix many of the bugs Lion had.

Hi !!!

I am having a similar problem in my Macbook Pro which iI purchased in June 2012 :-

I have lnstalled the MAC OS and Windows 7 OS. Both of them legal and original.

The Strange thing is that whenever I run the Windows OS, the macbook heats up tremendously - so much so that I cannot put my hand near the left side of the keyboard on the top also. But if i run the mac os the heating factor is normal.

If I run Parallels Desktop then both OS's run fine.

Apple Care Support's reply is as follows :-

I have got a response from the support engineering and they advised If the issue cannot be duplicated under Mac OS X then there is not much we can do, and you should contact Microsoft about it if you are using the correct version of the OS, and the latest Bootcamp drivers. Also ensure that a most up to dated version of Boot Camp is in use. If you are using an OEM version of Windows try a retail version of windows. We suggest to delete windows partition using BootCamp (Restore to one partition) and re-install.

-- AS QUOTED BY AppleCare Senior Advisor Case#432222518

I had also send them screen shots of the following which they required

, but no solution to my problem till now.

And from the reply, it comes to mind that Apple was always in favour of running their own OS on the Mac and it is only after seeing the customer base of windows users it took the step to incorporate both the mac OS and Windows in the macs so that more people could buy macs.

This leaves one thing in doubt :-

1. Could it possibly be a flaw overlooked by mac in respect of windows operation in its notebook ?????

Well, honestly the answer provided by Apple Care leaves a lot of questions unanswered. My main purpose to bring this to apple's notice is that if some problem with the mac hardware is there it can be rectified for future releases.

As of now I will have to use the mac os more frequently instead of the Windows OS on my Mac because tilldate Apple Care does not have a solution for my problem.