Apple Macbook Noisy Fan & Overheating Solution

Recently my 6 month old MacBook started running hot, at about 75c. It was also making a terrible noise as the fan was running at around 6000rpm. Not good.

After Some research I found that some people had experienced a similar problem. They were experiencing a document in the printing queue causing their MacBooks to continually process the document while awaiting it to be sent to the printer. Some people had documents several months old as they had sent them to a now disused printer.

To check if this is your problem simply got to your printer and fax setting in system preferences (or type printer and fax in finder). From there you will be able to check your printer queues. If you have any old documents delete them.

If that does not solve your problem read on...

My overheating problem was caused by running my little MacBook to the limit in regards to memory and storage space.
It took me a little while to figure this as even with a cleanly rebooted system, with very few programs running , and memory was free, I would still overheat.

The problem was simply that I had almost filled up my MacBook’s hard drive with files while organising old archive files. This had caused problems with virtual memory.

To solve my problem I simple deleted files and emptied the recycle bin. I went from only having 6 gigabyte free to having about 50 gigabyte free.

If you are experiencing a noisy fan and overheating, and neither of the above solutions apply to you, you may have a memory leak. That is an applications that is using more RAM than it should. again go to finder and type in “Activity Monitor”, from here you will be able to see which applications are using what percentage of system resources.

Also keep an eye on the CPU usage in the Activity manager, if any proceses are hogging CPU unnesarily try quiting with them, and check for updated to the aplication that may be more stable.

I hope this is usefull and saves you time in your quest for a cool and silent Mac. My MacBook is back to a nice running temperature of around 40c.