Overheated on WMV then OK after reboot

[ninoxrk]

Something curious happened to my week 9 MBA. It was a virtually silent machine, no issues whatsoever that I've owned for the past week. Could barely hear the fans most of the time. Then played some WMV files and the computer seemed to overheat.

The video began to stutter, the fans went to high speed. I quit everything except Safari without any video, and the fans just would not turn off, scrolling began having a delay, and the bottom of the computer felt very hot. Finally shut the computer down and restarted and now it's fine. Bottom of the computer is only warm, and it seems to play videos fine.

Question: has anybody else experienced this, and is this something I should worry about?

 

[sookainian]

Does not sound anything to worry about.

 

[ninoxrk]

Does not sound anything to worry about.

Right, but I have three other Macs and this has never happened on any of them, and the MBA is known for issues of overheating, core shutdown, and overly loud fan noise. I'm actually afraid of playing any more videos until I finish a presentation next week b/c I can't afford for it to melt down before then.

 

[Jeweller]

Does not sound anything to worry about.

I'm sorry, but how does this not sound like something that might at the very least raise concern? Since their release, I've had to return two Airs, the latter of which exhibited virtually the same behavior while trying to display WMV video file (and this, with flip-for-mac plugged in!). My advice is call Apple Care and explain the problem bluntly. Take no guff!

 

[motulist]

If this every happens again, open up Activity Monitor, set it to 'show all processes' and then you can see if any particular program is going crazy and consuming all of your cpu cycles. Some programs can leave a system process running even if you quit the program. If any process is consuming a very disproportionately high amount of CPU power than it should for the task it's supposed to be doing, then quit the program, and if the task still doesn't go away then you can quit or force quit the task through Activity monitor.

 

[mac jones]

The truth is that these devices are 'pushing' thermal limits

I have been vigilant in monitoring the cpu/fan operation and found that it will ramp up-and-down very rapidly.

A typical scenario is the cpu jumping form 47C to 87C in just seconds with the fan struggling to ramp up to it's max at 6200rpm.

Fortunately, the fan at 6200 can effectively handle this increase in temp, so on mine at least, it operates normally.

The point is; I could see a case where the fan might not quite do the trick forcing you to restart.

What worries me a bit is the fan not working correctly and it heating up all the way to China syndrome

 

[duffyanneal]

The biggest offender in my case was Safari. I noticed occasionally on my system that if I went to a flash heavy site or started playing WMVs/MPEGs that the CPU utilization would go to 80-100 percent, and stay there even if I stopped the video. Moving to a non-flash website would not fix the problem. I had to shutdown Safari before the system would settle down. I was able to duplicate this issue at will. There seemed to be a be a bug with Safari.

 

[ninoxrk]

I'm sorry, but how does this not sound like something that might at the very least raise concern? Since their release, I've had to return two Airs, the latter of which exhibited virtually the same behavior while trying to display WMV video file (and this, with flip-for-mac plugged in!). My advice is call Apple Care and explain the problem bluntly. Take no guff!

So I had turned on Activity Monitor, and all it showed was Safari using about 50% of the CPU at the moment. Nothing else seemed to be running, and there were no videos going except an ad or two. But I tried an mpeg on my desktop and it continued to stutter (sound was fine), the computer seemed very hot (very hot and very quickly, even though I'd put it to sleep to let it cool down), fans blowing loudly almost immediately, and scrolling by pressing the arrow keys started giving about a half-second delay! I thought: isn't this what I've been reading about?!!

Incidentally, I am using Flip-4-mac for the WMV files. So should I ask for a new computer? Did your third one do OK? Other than this glitch, I think the computer is great and everything I want in a laptop, and I'm not giving it up until I finish my presentation on Tuesday!