*Emergency* Macbook Air goes POSTAL !? FAN/CPU

[samroberto]

I picked up my Macbook Air, yesterday, and fell in love with it immediately - everything went over fine, and it started working out perfectly.
Today I went to my several classes, messed around afterwards and during lunch, and was on it at the library this evening.

*PROBLEM*
I opened a .ppt file in Keynote and in MS Powerpoint, hit PRINT
and then it went berserk.
6200 rpm fan speed, along with up to 80•degree CPU temp, and in my iStat Menu the Core%Usage kept jumping 100% from one core to the other.
-> The process that was supposedly eating everything was
"cgpdftoraster" as high as 100.0%

W.T.F. ?!?!?!

In panic, I shut my computer down through the menus like normal,
let it sit for like 5-10 seconds, and pressed power to boot up.
Within 5 seconds of sitting there after my desktop came up,
the cores activity shot back up to 100% jumping in between the cores with the same "cgpdftoraster" process, fan at 6200 rpms.


- as a side note let me say that my 1.6/80gb Air ran for 5 hours, 33 minutes today. Not even kidding. Wireless was on and off intermittently when I was surfing or getting distracted, brightness was 50%, and I was taking notes and running Keynote. - I was terrified when I saw people saying they only got 3.5 hours out (which still isn't bad at all) but I wanted *great* battery life, and after today's experience, I couldn't be happier. Again, I'm not real sure how I got such amazing life when others supposedly aren't - maybe it's the wireless on/off, and that I'm only taking notes/power-points; Regardless, today on the first charge I ran 5 hours and 33 minutes cumulatively today just after turning to 1% left.

Other than *this problem insane fan/processor problem that was plaguing my Air,
I couldn't be more satisfied with the product.

 

[Krevnik]

*PROBLEM*
I opened a .ppt file in Keynote and in MS Powerpoint, hit PRINT
and then it went berserk.
6200 rpm fan speed, along with up to 80•degree CPU temp, and in my iStat Menu the Core%Usage kept jumping 100% from one core to the other.
-> The process that was supposedly eating everything was
"cgpdftoraster" as high as 100.0%

This is 'by design' (somewhat).

To feed the data to the printer, it has to raster the PDF output from the application and feed it out to the printer queue. The process name is short for "CoreGraphics PDF to Raster". It is included in the OS.

How long was this process running, and did you ever let the print job finish? Was it running after the print job finished?

 

[wordy]

I know there are no other posts, but #2 wins.

 

[samroberto]

This is 'by design' (somewhat).

To feed the data to the printer, it has to raster the PDF output from the application and feed it out to the printer queue. The process name is short for "CoreGraphics PDF to Raster". It is included in the OS.

How long was this process running, and did you ever let the print job finish? Was it running after the print job finished?

Thanks for the info and reply I appreciate the help.
The first document printed normally, the second one took 5 times as long to print, where the printer would laser a few lines on, then stop and pause there. During all of this of course, the cores were bouncing 100% and fan was 6.2k.
I OP'd this thread during this period, and within the next 10 minutes, it had stopped. - BUt turning it off and on again seemed to have absolutely no effect.
Maybe this was because as soon as the computer was able it resumed sending info to the printer ? Idk ...
It wasn't too prolonged, but enough to scare the s** out of me and think o God NO NO please I thought this was a perfect macbook aiiiiiiir.

Again, thanks for the help. would Coolbook solve anything?
Is there a way to delete cgpdftoraster and use something else ha ha ?

 

[Krevnik]

Again, thanks for the help. would Coolbook solve anything?
Is there a way to delete cgpdftoraster and use something else ha ha ?

Not really. OS X needs that to print. Without it, you don't get to print.

The weird thing is that I print PDFs and the like from my Air and don't see any issues like that. What are the size of the documents you print, and what model printer are they printing to?

 

[wordy]

You should try printing a multipage TEXT only PDF and see if the same thing happens. If your PPT file had all kinds of images and fancy graphics, it would explain the CPU utilization, though not the degree you said it happened.

You should also try to view a 10minute+ YouTube video and see if you get the core shutdown. If you do then yes, Coolbook would help because you would be suffering from the well documented heat issue.