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Zemrec · Dec 17, 2003, 11:46 PM

For some reason, Monday night my new Albook 15" 1.25 started running the fan almost constantly. I got it at the beginning of November, and since then I've only heard the fan when playing DVDs, games, or other CPU intensive tasks.

The room temperature hasn't changed, its about 70 deg, I have the PB on a Roadtools Podium Coolpad, so there is ventilation under it. I tried deleteing power management prefs and rebooting, no change.

And I just installed the new 10.3.2 and battery update, with no change.

Why is it doing this? I just rebooted and I'm only running Safari and Dragthing for apps right now and the fan is running.

I opened up Activiy Viewer and only Safari is taking up CPU at 10-20%. But whats strange is %user is up to 95%, and there's no % idle at all. Is there some hidden process thats running the CPU?

Whoa!!!

I just opened up a terminal and ran top, and I saw Print Job Mgr was taking 76% of the CPU.
I had tried printing something a few days ago, but it didn't print, and I forgot about it. Yet, the print spooler isn't even running as an app and not listed in Activity Manager!

What the heck???

So I tried opening a print spool window, and canceled the job, and bingo, I've got idle time now and the fan went off.

What the heck?!?

Tomster · Dec 17, 2003, 11:51 PM

I would like to recommend MenuMeters, a wonderful piece of software which, among other things, puts your cpu usage in your menu bar. Lets you know when a process chews up all of your free cycles.

chabig · Dec 17, 2003, 11:55 PM

My 12" PB fan has been on continuously since I updated to 10.3.2 and I've seen at least one other comment saying the same thing. Battery life doesn't seem to be affected. I'm calibrating my battery and will check it again afterward.

Chris

Some Guy [] · Dec 18, 2003, 12:06 AM

same here, i just posted a thread in the macosx forum.. 12" pbook 867mhz.

-justin

uv23 · Dec 18, 2003, 12:17 AM

Was just reading reports on macrumors.com about fans not shutting off with 10.3.2. Needless to say, I'm holding off before I update. I thought I was free of faulty "updates" when I switched. Guess not.

dgbatchelor · Dec 18, 2003, 12:31 AM

Originally posted by Zemrec:

I just opened up a terminal and ran top, and I saw Print Job Mgr was taking 76% of the CPU.
I had tried printing something a few days ago, but it didn't print, and I forgot about it. Yet, the print spooler isn't even running as an app and not listed in Activity Manager!

What the heck???

So I tried opening a print spool window, and canceled the job, and bingo, I've got idle time now and the fan went off.

What the heck?!?

Let me guess -- You printed to a USB printer which wasn't hooked up at the time of print? If so, ever since, the Print Job Mgr is trying real hard to find your printer and get the job completed. (Unfortunately, it appears that the Print Job Mgr is too aggressively looking -- and consuming mega cycles for naught... I would think that this should be something which should be addressed in an OS update.)

Zemrec · Dec 18, 2003, 12:40 AM

Originally posted by dgbatchelor:
Let me guess -- You printed to a USB printer which wasn't hooked up at the time of print? If so, ever since, the Print Job Mgr is trying real hard to find your printer and get the job completed. (Unfortunately, it appears that the Print Job Mgr is too aggressively looking -- and consuming mega cycles for naught... I would think that this should be something which should be addressed in an OS update.)

Yeah thats my guess. I have my printer connected to my Airport Extreme basestation. Not sure why its not working. I'll have to play with it later.

Blanchard · Dec 18, 2003, 04:04 PM

My fan (Pbook AI 15") stays on all the time, and I ran top in Terminal and I have nothing excessively running, except Word @ 10%.

It's been this way before and after 10.3.2.

What gives?

Blanchard · Dec 18, 2003, 04:06 PM

Oh yeah, and Temperature Monitor says 46,3 C. I have the Pbook resting on pegs.

Blanchard · Dec 18, 2003, 04:27 PM

Ok, sorry it's me again.

I've done some test and it's not the fan that dies the whirling sound (almost silent, but my room is very quiet). It's the hard disk spinning, that's all. The sound stopped when the disk spinned down (I adjusted the spindown to 1 minute in Cocktail, and after a minute the sound stopped).

So maybe some who are complaining about the fan are talking about the hard disk, located beneath the track pad.