MacBook fan keeps turning on

Question

Whenever I open up my MacBook, the fan turns on. Many people say it turns on because of your antivirus and because iStat Menus causes it to turn on, but I don't have either, and the fan still turns on. What should I do?

Answer 1

If you have high CPU activity you need to figure out what is causing it. Click "Go" on your toolbar, click Utilities, click Activity Monitor, click CPU on lower left, click CPU on upper left, click it again and see which Process Name is causing the trouble. Either you will know what to do (kill the process, delete it or investigate it, tweak it or whatever) or you will not know. But you will have something to tell the Genius when you visit Apple. If your CPU is high then that produces heat, which only means your fans are on high for a reason. In other words your fans are NOT faulty, but you are not managing your OSX effectively.
The SMC is free and do-able, and it DOES address fans (they are listed in the article) but like all of these maintenance operations they can potentially cause trouble. Only do these operations if you have cloned your OSX to an external hard drive, or if you are using Time Machine (same thing). Or if you don't mind losing all your data and wind up re-installing OSX from scratch.
* Kind of a side-issue: Open System Preferences and get into your System Accounts, click Login Items and see what is there. Myself, I pretty much remove everything using the + and - signs. These items will place themselves there without you knowing - sometimes you benefit, but rarely. And they can run in the background without you knowing.
* Kind of a side-issue Part II: Open System Preferences, open Print & Fax, open Print Queue, delete any jobs that might be there. The field under 'Status' should be empty.
Message was edited by: NA Smith