why is my fan always running on my macbook pro?

Notebook fans run continuously, so unless there's something else you haven't described this is quite normal.

Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

Uninstall your anti-virus software from AVG. Anti-virus software isn't required.

Do an SMC reset.

carl wolf wrote:

Do an SMC reset.

That's for if the fans are running with little or no high CPU activity.

The OP obviously has some sort of runaway process and likely other issues, so the uninstall of whatever went wrong using the developers uninstaller instead should clear the issue.

I simply went into activity monitor and had seen that the adobe resource synchonizer was running at 82% cpu, I forced it to quit and fan stopped running almost immediately and hasn't been a problem since. What a relief my fan was starting to run more and more frequently and at higher and higher rpms and I couldnt find a fix online forever it seemed, hope this is what your experiencing and it helps.

I had this very problem. Took me a few days (maybe a couple hours) poking around on the web, trying this and that. No luck.

Then I went into activity monitor, where the avgcmgr process was always popping up by itself, oftentimes many instances of it. Doing the "force quit" whackamole thing was getting old... so I did a "sample process", and in there found a path to the file that was spawning this problem:

/opt/avg/avg9/bin/avgcmgr

That is, through "Finder" -> your macHD/opt/avg/avg9/bin/avgcmgr

I went in there, selected all files in the /opt directory, dragged them into the trash, and emptied the trash.

System told me it couldn't get rid of about 10 files due to them being in use. FINE. Restart. First thing, opened Acivity Monitor, thing hadn't spawned yet. Emptied trash. BAM.

So far, it's been about an hour and no more whackamole. I think it's dead. I'll repost here if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

Everything else seems to be running fine/as normal, with no screaming fan and choppy performance.

I have NO IDEA what caused this. If anyone here does, please share.

Thanks!

thanks

Johnny, there is some information here.

Macbook Pro mid 2009 fans run continuously. iStat only sees one fan running at 1999 rpm. I opened it up and both fans are running. CPU >90% available. Temperature for all that istat shows are 40 degrees C or less.

The fans started behaving like this right about the time I updated to new mac OS.

Everything works fine, but the fans constantly running is holding me back from upgrading my RAM thinking there may be an underlying problem, for instance why would istat only report one fun running when both are running?

I would appreciate any suggestions and hope my description might hone possible causes down to a handfull. Heat, runaway programs would be eliminated as causes I assume.d

Wow, I was about to open up my Macbook Pro until I decided to search online first... I found this entry and did as told... It turns out there was a program called "Kies" running 95% of my CPU. It's a Samsung Software to sync their tablet. I got rid of their lame tablet months ago - now their software went to the trash too!!

Thanks!

I had the same problem, the fan was running whilst looking at this top i did what was mentioned above and came to realise itunes was using 100% CPU!! force quit and now the fan has turned off..... interesting. anyway of solving this? as now it seems my fan has stopped coming on unless i open itunes :/

thanks in advanced

In my case, it appeared to be the latest version of the Sparrow mail client. This one was tricky, because Activity Monitor showed normal CPU usage an nothing jumped out at me as abnormally high. I started closing out programs one by one. Couldn't quite track it down. As I was reopening programs, I noticed my fan was much quieter and I still had yet to open Sparrow back up. Then I thought about how Sparrow appears to be constantly downloading your entire mailbox in the background (you can see your scrollbar growing smaller and smaller if you pay close attention...after a while it gets really tiny and only briefly appears...but you can still track it). If you have Sparrow installed and running, I'd start by closing it out first and waiting a few minutes (10 minutes at the most) to see if your fan calms down. If it doesn't, kill the next suspected program and repeat the process.

Installed, but not running according to the taskbar, I found Firefox to be the cause of my CPU fan running on high speed constantly

chriss-MacBook-Pro-2:~ cbake$ ps ax | grep firefox

21978 ?? R 14568:22.31 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -psn_0_92170209

23921 ?? R 20248:09.52 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -psn_0_20460418

47203 ?? R 1008:00.96 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -psn_0_138142646

47227 ?? R 1005:23.91 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -psn_0_138183616

47227 firefox 102.8 16:44:50 1/1 0 9 1137 90M 149M 460K 249M 3681M 47222 1 running 501 128 42 8 4

47203 firefox 101.0 16:47:27 1/1 0 9 976 106M 150M 528K 265M 3689M 47197 1 running 501 151 39 8 4

After killing those 4 pids, the fan slowed down to normal speed.

MBP: Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013 - OS X 10.8.3 - 2.8 GHz i7 - 16 GB DDR3