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I had a few safari windows open and clicked on a pdf document, which then downloaded to the desktop instead of opening. Immediately following this, I heard the fan in my PB spin up a bit faster. I turned on temeperature monitor and saw the temperature climb steadily from 48 C to 58 C and my fan was going mad! I have never seen my PB hotter than 50 C and that was while doing intensive work. I shut down safari and the temperature immediately began to drop. Very strange indeed. Has anyone else noticed somethign similar happen?

Can you share the url from the site you download the pdf for testing? Could it be something on the webpage you visited?

Haven't experience this yet.

It is not really an issue with your PB as such. But I am pretty sure this is a bug in either Safari, or iChat (or both). Do you happen to use iChat?
Let me explain.. There is a bug that has cropped up for some people that for some reason causes the CPU to max out and stay there, right after downloading a file via Safari. It is inconsistant though, and there is no way to make it happen. It just sometimes happens.. Get yourself a CPU gauge/meter type app (I use 'Cee Pee You' from unsanity) and you will see what I mean. It will sometimes be seen to peg itself at 100% and stick there for apparently no reason right after a download.
So, if your CPU maxes out at 100% or so, then obviously some additional heat is going to be produced.
But curiously, when this happens, look at your 'Activity monitor' app, and if you are using iChat, you should see that it is actually iChat hogging all the CPU and not Safari as you would expect. Odd one huh..
If I remember rightly, restarting Safari did not restore the CPU load to more normal levels. But restarting iChat most definitely did fix it.
Also interesting, is that from what I have seen, this oddity only occours on Apple laptops, rather than DeskTop macs (unless someone knows otherwise).

Very strange. It was just a pdf from the lacie site on their Porsche product line. I'll check the activity monitor should it happen again. And nope, I don't use iChat.

I can reproduce this problem consistently with lawschool.westlaw.com. After updating to Panther I began to experience CPU maxed out freezes when utilizing Safari to search in westlaw.com, a legal research website. I do not experience this problem with Explorer.

You need a password search for cases there though and because it is expensive, perhaps only other law students can verify this.

I'll check if iChat is the actual cause of this.

Update: Ok, I can no longer reproduce the problem, with or without iChat. Strange indeed! This had been happening all semester. I last fell for it 3 weeks ago during finals. The only difference is that I'm at home using a dialup instead of the wireless network. Also I believe that I updated once in this period. I'm on 10.3.2. Perhaps the bug was resolved.

Are you running 10.3.1 or 10.3.2?

uv23, I've tried that pdf file from Lacie site and tried to reproduce your scenario. Nothing spin up at all. Sorry couldn't give you a hand on this.

Can you still reproduce that problem?

P.S. I don't use iChat either.

It hasn't happened since, no. Very interesting. Could be some sort of safari flaw that created an infinite loop, or some sort of cascading memory leak. I'll definitely post back if it happens again, with more info.