What does it mean if the Quit icon is greyed out??

Hello,

One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, Test for problem in Safe Mode...

PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive

Reboot, test again.

If it only does it in Regular Boot, then it could be some hardware problem like Video card, (Quartz is turned off in Safe Mode), or Airport, or some USB or Firewire device, or 3rd party add-on, Check System Preferences>Accounts (Users & Groups in later OSX versions)>Login Items window to see if it or something relevant is listed.

Check the System Preferences>Other Row, for 3rd party Pref Panes.

Also look in these if they exist, some are invisible...

/private/var/run/StartupItems

/Library/StartupItems

/System/Library/StartupItems

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/LaunchDaemons

And/or...

Open Console in Applications>Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

NOTE: the kernel is the operating system. You cannot quit the OS. You can only reboot it.

Also, it is possible the kernel is being called by an app or 3rd party kernel extension which is causing it to consume so much CPU time

Jace128 wrote:

Kernel Task is using 600% of my CPU. When I try to quit the process in Activity Monitor, the QUIT icon is greyed out....?

I wish I could get my Mac to do this. How do you get the 6 times speed bump?

I think you are on the wrong forum - the advice I would give to Leopard users will not help you.

I wish I could get my Mac to do this. How do you get the 6 times speed bump?

I think you get 600% from a quad-core chip with hyper-threading (simulates 8 CPUs), and 6 of the CPUs are saturated.

BobHarris wrote:

I think you get 600% from a quad-core chip with hyper-threading (simulates 8 CPUs), and 6 of the CPUs are saturated.

On a MacBook Pro?

On a MacBook Pro?

Yes. I have a 2011 15" Macbook Pro with a Quad-Core i7 chip that supports Hyper-Threading that makes each core look like 2 CPUs, for a total of 8 CPUs that Mac OS X is managing.

When I tell MenuMeters to show each CPU as a separate menubar graph, I have 8 little CPU graphs (not much room for anything else on my menubar when I do that 🙂 ).

Here is my System Information (formally called System Profiler):

Sudden Motion Sensor:

Perhaps a little faster than my 733 MHz G4

From my Activity Monitor:

I tried to create some work so they would not look empty, which most of the time they are as I do not push this system all that much.

Here is mine - mainly Activity Monitor - with decoration just for fun: