MacBook Pro running hot after upgrade

Question

Hey everyone,
First off: Upgraded to Mountain Lion and I absolutely love it. I'm running on a December 2011 MacBook Pro Unibody 15", 8 Gigs ram, i7, SSD 256 drive (Apple). It had Lion installed when it came, obviously.
Now that I upgraded to Mountain Lion, it's running several degrees celcius hotter than before, after a couple of hours of using it. I figured I'd give it a few hours to do its search database thing etc...you know, let the system stuff in the background settle down, but it's still running very hot.
Is this something which eveyrone else has been experiencing? I've got two methods of checking the tempurature: iStat Nano on the Dashboard (which I don't use for anything else...) and smcFanControl which sits in my menu bar. Both give me the same tempurature and it's running literally about 5 to 7 degrees more (or sometimes even spiking at 15 degrees more for a few seconds) than before.
Just wondering if I'm the only one? Should I be patient and give it a day or so? Any tips?
Thanks,
Nat.

Answer 1

You're right that in the first few hours ML will be busy in the background running certain processes like indexing Spotlight and Time Machine.
You can see if these are still indexing by looking at the menu bar. Click on Spotlight - if you get a progress bar saying its indexing, just leave everthing alone till its finished. If you look at the TM icon, it should be slowly circling if TM is still indexing. Again, click on the icon and see what it says.
If these seem to have completed, check in Activity Monitor.app (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app) as to what is using up %CPU time. If you see kernel_task is running wild (+80%) , try a PRAM reset. To do so, folllow this procedure:
1. Power down the machine.
2. Locate the following keys on your keyboard in preparation for Step 4:
‘command’ – ‘option’ – ‘P’ – ‘R’
3. Press the ‘power on’ button.
4. Immediately – and before the grey screen appears – hold down ‘command-option-P-R’ all together.
5. Keep them held down until you’ve heard the start-up chime twice. After you release them you should hear it again, and hopefully your Mac will boot up as it should and with the kernel_task process back to normal.