The Computer Oracle

How to determine why the fan is running on MacBook Air?

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Chapters
00:00 How To Determine Why The Fan Is Running On Macbook Air?
00:21 Accepted Answer Score 10
00:43 Answer 2 Score 2
01:22 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/421060/h...

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Tags
#osxlion #fan #process #overheating

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 10


The fan is turning on because the CPU is being taxed. You can look at what processes are using the CPU with Activity Monitor:

screenshot of Activity Monitor

image credit

Activity Monitor is a built-in application. Type "Activity Monitor" into Spotlight and it should be the first result.




ANSWER 2

Score 2


Activity Monitor defaulted to show only "My Processes". None of those seemed to be the source of the problem.

However, when I switched the Activity Monitor view to "All Processes" Carbonite was the clear culprit. About 60 seconds after I set Carbonite to "Pause for 24 hours" its CPU utilization dropped to < 1% and my annoyingly loud fan slowed down then stopped.

I'm only using Carbonite, because I had a few months left on my old license, but I'm not sure its worth listening to a noisy fan for hours on end while it trickles my bits to the cloud.