Comments on: Mac Running Hot, Slow, & Fans Blazing After Installing OS X Lion? Here’s Why

By: B

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:47:53 +0000

distnoted should not be taking up nearly that much CPU, you may have something weird.

By: iSmack

iSmack — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 03:00:05 +0000

Just after I was posted my previous comment I thought I check out if there are updates available. There was 10.7.3. I installed it.

After reboot and using computer normally (Safari, Mail, FaceTime, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Flash) about 15 minutes the cpu temp was 35-38°C (fan 2400 rpm), cpu usage is now 2-7 percent when only Safari is on. Mds and mdsworker still 0 and now “distnoted” shows 0.0-0.2 percent.

Earlier sluggish behaviour is pretty much gone. So, if u still have 10.7.2 you could try os update and perhaps it helps you as it perfectly helped me.

By: iSmack

iSmack — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 01:56:57 +0000

It’s now third day with Lion and my a year old C2D iMac still runs hot and slow. On Snow leopard cpu temp was from 35 to 42°C. On Lion up to 78°C. With smcfancontrol I got the temp lower (cpu fan 3600 rpm -> 40-55°C).

On System monitor:

“mds”: cpu% 0
“mdsworker”: cpu% 0
“distnoted” “user”: cpu% 127.7-136.2 (?)

iStat shows all the time: (no programs on, internet connection off)

CPU 73-85%
USER 17-36%

Is that normal?

By: yflyer

yflyer — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:02:30 +0000

My fan started continually running-my son suggested, and it worked:

Try a “false startup”. Remove the battery and disconnect from the power supply, then attempt startup (hold the button down for at least 5 seconds). This resets the machine’s power allocation controls to default levels. That fixed my incessant fan.

If the battery has run down – due to not being connected and the fan continually on, and the Macbook won’t restart, then reconnect the power, and follow the above.

By: David

David — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:32:29 +0000

I was wondering if there was an issue with storage space being completely used while this indexing process worked.
I have a macbook 2009 and it went from having 70+ gigs free to having less than 1 gig free. I also uninstalled cloud and that free’d up 19 gigs of space. So i was wondering if there was backup files running or some other duplicate file being ran that would allow me to get back the 70+ gigs that have “disappeared”.

Anyone have any idea what backup type files the new operation system might have made?
I have did a search through all the major folders on the computer and i have found 171 gigs of space used. The remaining space is not within the search query and i cannot locate this 70+ gigs that should still be available. I have a 250 gig hard drive in this laptop.

By: ken

ken — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:09:43 +0000

I don’t care what anybody says about Lion “re-indexing.” I installed this puppy two weeks ago and everything takes longer to accomplish, web browsing, opening documents/attachments, opening email messages. Start up time has doubled. This baby slows down everything it touches. I “know” Apple will fix this thing… (wink, wink).

By: philsgt

philsgt — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:17:36 +0000

I think the mdworker32 as regards to Spotlight is causing a BIG problem and should be fixed by Apple! I have been running Lion for 3 months and this cpu runaway started just 3 days ago. It caused hard drives to disconnect with out warning, stopped TimeMachine from backing up, and the keyboard fails to be seen.

If this is a “normal Function” then Lion will go down in history as worse than Windows!

By: Zane

Zane — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:38:49 +0000

I installed Lion on the release day and have been trying to figure out the sluggishness of my machine ever since.

Initially I did an upgrade install directly after download. Then I tried a clean install and backup from Time Machine. When migrating my old applications Flash Player was brought across to Lion and this seemed to really cause issues with the CPU speed and temperatures. I have now unistalled it, but this was not the only cause of the system running slow.

I found that using Photoshop and Aperture 3.0 to be painfully slow, just loading photos and entering full screen, even with all other applications closed. In addition swapping between applications took forever.

Last week I bought 8GB DDR3 RAM from Crucial to replace the 4GB Apple RAM, at the same time I cleaned the CPU fan and generally removed all dust I could find in under the bottom cover. I then reset the SMC and PRAM and then booted. I now have a stable fast laptop again. I notice that I am using about 6GB of RAM most of the time leaving 2GB free, 900MB of this is the Kernal, the rest is made up of Safari, Mail, Skype and Aperture.

MBP Mid 2009 2.26GHZ 8GB DDR3 RAM 500GB SEAGATE HD OSX Lion

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:52:05 +0000

I tried the shift-option-command strategy but it didn’t help. I finally went into activity monitor and shut down folding@home. I installed that recently, trying to be a positive contributor, but it looks like it makes macs run hot and trigger the fan while they are in idle mode. I figured that’s not a good thing, so I turned it off. But maybe I’m wrong?

By: Fix Fan Noise & Overheating After Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Fix Fan Noise & Overheating After Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:14:21 +0000

[...] excessive and unusual fan noise. For users who have just performed an upgrade from 10.6, this is usually because of Spotlight and the mdworker & mds process combination, which irons itself out over the course of an hour [...]

By: Geos

Geos — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 20:05:57 +0000

Thanks dumpster!

I was experiencing most of the issues described above by many people… I am using a late-2010 15″ MBP, 8GB RAM, 500GB 7200 rpm, HDD … It was uber sluggish, frequent beachballs, hot and noisy fans … This is a CLEAN Lion installation, almost 1 month old now. Idexing and all alike background processes completed long, long time ago.

I was a step away from going back to SL, then tried the suggestion of dumpster above….

Maybe still early to celebrate, but my MBP feels snappy again! The difference in performance is easily 5-10 times!

Thanks you dumpster! You have saved my day (and night of reinstallation)

By: dumpster

dumpster — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:29:26 +0000

Shutdown and clear your System Management Controller (SMC) by holding down the Option-Command-Shift and Power button for 10 seconds then release them. Power up.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:04:43 +0000

My 17″ MBP 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with the full Apple Certified 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 never had a problem until after I installed Mac OS X Lion now at 10.7.1 (11B26). Anybody who has been around OS know that its better to install fresh vs upgrading, but I obeyed Apple by upgrading. Now I’m experiencing either extended lags in responsiveness or complete lockup right in the middle of working on a moderate size Word document with a copy of Omnigraffle and Safari on an attached monitor. I’m talking minutes versus seconds! Applications no longer just jump up and down and open within milliseconds, its now takes 30+ seconds. My fans start kicking on for no apparent reason. I can say this because under Snow Leopard the fans would kick on after I wrote a bad SQL statement, but rarely brakes a sweat on anything else. At first I thought it was a permission problem because I kept having to enter my admin password for everything! Of course I ran the verify/repair permissions and that didn’t help at all. Its only when I ran chown/chmod on my entire Users directory that it fixed that problem. But the lockup and/or slow responses is still here.

The standard Apple Care troubleshoot doesn’t work here. I called 4 times, the first three they didn’t know what to do except to say that this is an intermit problem and couldn’t help. The fourth time, I got bumped up to the level 2 support, who had me delete all of my caches and plist files. This ended up screwing up a few applications, which require a reinstall.

So, being a techie I borrowed a friend’s spare 64GB SSD and installed a fresh copy of Lion onto it. After a few tweaks had it working with my old drive by mapping the applications back to the fresh copy, etc. And guess what? No lags, slow responsiveness, applications opened like they did under Snow Leopard and no more asking for my admin password. But sadly I had to give the SSD back. I know the SSD would be a stark improvement, but I believe the fresh install resolved the problems I’m experiencing. Unfortunately I can’t afford a 500GB SSD, so I’ll have to time machine my drive then do a fresh install.

By: Tiago

Tiago — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:33:14 +0000

Just bougth my Macbook Pro yesterday. 2GHz i7 Quadcore Today I upgraded to Lion through app store and what a disapointment. Now I’m writting this from SL again. ALOT of heat. Battery went from 6h working all morning to 3 hours after Lion install. Fan was wild. What a fail OS. I feel robbed and would really like to file a complaint to get my money back. Anyone know how or if its possible?

I’m trying the clean install into another partition tomorrow and see how that goes. But I dont expect much. Its really patch time or money back time. It reminds me of when I had WindowsXP and Vista came out. Never manage to really change until 7 came. Its the same thing they say its the big step forward but its really 3 steps back (or more).

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:22:04 +0000

This has got to be the most disappointing release of OSx yet. I did a full clean install after my Mac ground to a halt. The new version seem to work well for two weeks, but now it is awful. Constant index building, fans, overheating and odd noise from the keyboard.

Looking forward to OSx 10.7.2

Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 (11B26)