Fan (?) running excessively on MBP?

[asherman13]

The fan on my 1.83Ghz bog-standard MacBook Pro seems to be running quite frequently recently...any idea as to why? I haven't made any significant changes to cause this; I just noticed yesterday or the day before that the fan (or perhaps something else) is kinda loud when I'm only doing small things, like running iChat & Safari concurrently (like right now)...

Help?

 

[jsw]

Is it a sort of rattling/buzzing noise? I've noticed that recently in mine, and it goes away if I rotate the MBP up/down or tap it lightly.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a good sign....

 

[asherman13]

Is it a sort of rattling/buzzing noise? I've noticed that recently in mine, and it goes away if I rotate the MBP up/down or tap it lightly.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a good sign....

It's kind of a buzzing sound, but the buzzing sound that you hear when a fan moves really fast, hence my thought that it could be a fan, or perhaps the hard disk platters moving (?).

Doesn't go away with tilting or tapping; it does kind of sound like it's coming from under the right side of the keyboard, or so it seems when I put my head close to the computer.

 

[jsw]

Well, it sounds like mine does, but mine can be stopped... but it might be getting worse. Looks like perhaps we both should pay a visit to the Apple Store....

 

[asherman13]

Well, it sounds like mine does, but mine can be stopped... but it might be getting worse. Looks like perhaps we both should pay a visit to the Apple Store....

Yeah, probably. I know it's not a "whine"; I installed the CHUD tools a while back and so the Processor switch is on my menu bar and that doesn't do anything for it. It keeps going for a bit after I close the lid and put it to sleep; when I wake it up it waits a bit before starting. I do have the "Put Hard Drive to sleep" box checked in Energy Saver, so as far as I know it isn't the HDD.

 

[asherman13]

After perusing iStat Nano I realized that nearly all of my memory is being used (see attachment). Any way I can reset this? I'm only running Safari right now (WTF?!?); Airport is on and running as well.

Could this be the problem? ::Goes to check the Activity Monitor::

EDIT Seems as nothing too bad there; my widgets seem to be taking up a decent amount of real and virtual memory; any way to reset that?

 

[asherman13]

Eureka!

Sorry to do a new post again, but I think I found the real answer:

From http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/macbook-pro-noise-complaints/:

3. Mooing Motors. This noise emanates from the lower-right corner of the laptop, near where the optical drive is located. The noise seems connected to machine temperature, and some have speculated that it’s simply a fan that is starting and stopping in response to the temperature. The fault here if that is the case is that the fan is so repeatedly started and stopped, such that it is noticeably active over a long period of time. The fan never seems to come on and stay on, it ramps up and then dies. I don’t have any info about whether acknowledges this as a flaw or not.

I think that's what it is...

 

[bimboles]

I took my last MBP back because of the mooing and this one is now doing it too. It is really begining to get on my t1ts.