Macbook air 2011 a lot warmer after mountain lion upgrade

It's not unusual after an operating system upgrade, for the Spotlight indexing to take many hours to index your hard drive, with the system getting quite warm during that process.

Agree 5 days is a little long to be indexing. If, for some reason, it were still doing that, it would give you a message in the Spotlight box when you tried to use it.

You've looked at the Activity Monitor (in applications/utilities) with the all processes option, to see if anything is churning the CPU?

I also have a mid-2011 MBA and updated to Mountain Lion a few days. I have been having the same problem also, and there appear to be other threads about this elsewhere in support.

I found - rather stumbled upon - this kb article regarding a firmware update that is needed to implement the Power Nap feature in ML. I am hoping that somehow this will address the heating issue. You might want to check it out if you haven't done so already. I just did the firmware update myself, so don't know yet if the overheating is fixed.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5394

Yes it looks like the firmware update does not address the overheat, although I'm not yet sure if the Power Nap is doing what it's supposed to or not since I just installed it yesterday. So for now time to get the lap desk out to keep my thighs from burning until Cupertino can look into this.

Same problem here: MacBook Air 2011 i5 1.6GHz, 4 GB Ram

Hotter since Mountain Lion.

I have both a 2009 MBP and a mid 2011 MBA with Mountain Lion installed. That fans aren't running any sooner, faster, or more often than with Lion. Maybe I'm lucky 🙂. What I suggest you do first is restart the computer and immediately launch the Activity Monitor and switch it to the CPU panel.

In the top window there's a list of every process running and the 4th column over is CPU. If you click on the word CPU you can sort the the processes in order by CPU usage - click until it sorts from highest to lowest. Now at a glance you can see which processes are taxing the CPU the most and by how much.

Right now I have Safari, Mail and quite a few other applications running and my highest usage is Safari with it ranging from 4% to 10% CPU usage. The processes in the background are all considerably less except for Mail every 5 minutes when it checks for new mail. That's about the same numbers I saw in Lion, though Safari is a bit more CPU and RAM hungry in ML.

For your computer to be running hotter it is using the CPU more (or the fans less). So the first step is to see if you have any processes (programs) really using the CPU at a rate that seems abnormally high. If nothing seems out of the ordinary, there are a couple programs that let you adjust the fan settings so they come on sooner and/or run faster.

Hello, I did check activity monitor very often. I also change to top pop-up to All Process instead of just mine.

I can't see much

but

in console, I have this error about 10 time per second

2012-08-05 9:20:23.566 AM ALSPlugin 235.55[75]: Failed to get brightness for displayID 0x04273cc0

I go into System preference-> Monitor , and I uncheck the "Automatically adjust brightness"

The message stop, I wait a while, check it back on, and check in on again, and the message do not come came.... immediately at least. I guess as soon as a change it detected, the message come back. a few second later, the message start again.

I did a clean install of Moutain Lion and re-installed back very few program, XCode, iWork, iLife, and SMC Fan Control.

I check the last one very often. I use the App to put the fan at 2500 RPM During writing simple text like I am doing now, Temperature use to be around 44 celcius in 10.7 Now in 10.8 it is at 57 Celcius, but after unchecking the Auto-Brightness, it start to go down, I am back around 54. I will wait to see where it stabilize..

Thanks for the heads up. I just bought a mid-11 13" Air, saw your tip and downloaded..... I went to install the package and it says the software isn't supported by my computer.

"About this Mac" shows that it's a mid-11 machine. The SMC version installed is 1.73f65..... does anyone have any ideas why I can't install the firmware update?

Cheers