Macbook pro runs hot and drains battery despite no runaway programs.

[sagegami]

I have a late 2008 Unibody15.4" MBP with a 2.8 GHz core 2 duo processor 8GB of DDR3 1067MHz ram and a 750GB HDD. For over a year now my MBP gets quite hot (75C) or so, the fans come on quickly, and I get about 45 minutes of battery life (despite my battery being only half the age of the computer) even though there is no heavy CPU usage I can detect. Activity monitor displays what you see in the photo. Whenever I look online for a solution all the help articles tell me to find and shutdown any runaway programs as though that is the only possible problem. If there are any runaway programs Activity Monitor can't find them. Please advise, I'm tired of being frustrated over this.

 

[Kaveman]

This list is only showing My Processes

 

[MartiInChico]

I have a late 2008 Unibody15.4" MBP with a 2.8 GHz core 2 duo processor 8GB of DDR3 1067MHz ram and a 750GB HDD. For over a year now my MBP gets quite hot (75C) or so, the fans come on quickly, and I get about 45 minutes of battery life (despite my battery being only half the age of the computer) even though there is no heavy CPU usage I can detect. Activity monitor displays what you see in the photo. Whenever I look online for a solution all the help articles tell me to find and shutdown any runaway programs as though that is the only possible problem. If there are any runaway programs Activity Monitor can't find them. Please advise, I'm tired of being frustrated over this.

I have the same problem! It seems like it would help to set the MacBook on a rack that allowed more air to circulate under it, but I have never seen a product made specifically for this purpose.
Has anyone solved this problem?

thanx
marti

 

[ichimj]

This list is only showing My Processes

What should it show? All Processes? When I put mine to All Processes, there is one called WindowServer under user _windowserver. It's almost always at the top, right now it's showing CPU 30.9. I tried quitting that process a few days ago and it asked me for my admin password and then logged me out. I don't know what that process is. Quitting it didn't do anything but log me out and close my programs.

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I tried quitting that process a few days ago and it asked me for my admin password and then logged me out.

Please do not touch it again also, don't touch login_window unless you know what you're doing, just don't mess with things in Activity Monitor.
WindowServer draws everything you see on the screen. It is a sort of mediator between your applications and the graphics hardware.

An example of this is when an application say pages wants to draw something, it establishes a connection with WindowServer, tells WindowServer what to draw, and WindowServer handles the drawing / compositing / Quartz Extreme hardware
acceleration to finally produce what's seen on the entire screen.

At the present time while typing this my WindowServer is showing 0.4
So there must be an application using it if yours is running at 30.9.

 

[ichimj]

At the present time while typing this my WindowServer is showing 0.4
So there must be an application using it if yours is running at 30.9.

Thanks for letting me know what WindowServer is. I feel daft now for messing with it, eek. So, how do I figure out what's using it? It's sitting at 40.7 right now.

(I tried to upload a screenshot but the attachment thingy says .tiff is an invalid format)

 

[oldscribe]

Hi


Open System Preferences, click on Accounts, click on the Login Items tab. Highlight your user name and see what's loading on startup. Let us know.

 

[ichimj]

Hi


Open System Preferences, click on Accounts, click on the Login Items tab. Highlight your user name and see what's loading on startup. Let us know.

My response to this is here: https://www.mac-help.com/t212315-serious-bother-macbook-temperature-fan.html