Okay, so that was a bit of a sensationalist title. My laptop has not yet exploded.<\/p>\n
Here’s the deal. I applied the 10.5.3 update to my MacBook a few days ago, when it was released. It took a moment, rebooted, and I was back up and running. Nothing bad seemed<\/em> to have happened. At least, for the first five minutes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then my fan started a-crankin’. For no apparent reason. Now, sometimes that’ll happen when Spotlight re-indexes, or when Time Machine says “I’m backin’ up, and nothing on earth will stop me!” So I didn’t think too much of it. Half hour goes by, and now I’m a bit concerned.<\/p>\n I took a gander at the MacRumors forums<\/a>, which is a great place to look for mac help. A few people had issues with 10.5.3, but nobody really had my issue. So, I put up with it for a few days – this wasn’t hindering my use of the computer, it didn’t seem to slow anything down. Activity monitor didn’t show anything obvious, either. And even at its loudest, the MacBook isn’t very loud.<\/p>\n Typically, I use it plugged in, so battery life is not an issue. But this weekend, I was carrying the ‘book around the house with me. I expect it to usually get around 4 hours of battery life.<\/p>\n With the fan crankin’, I got less than 2. Something is definitely up.<\/p>\n Checked the forums again, checked Activity Monitor again. Nothing obvious. So I did a quick<\/p>\n Right at the top of the list, pid #85, was the IPSecuitasDaemon, trying to start up – and eating 94% cpu, whenever I wasn’t doing anything! OS X clearly knew that that was not a particularly important process, but it was a constant<\/em> process. According to ps, it had tried to launch at startup. Now, Activity Monitor wasn’t showing me that daemon in it’s default view, but I’m sure I could have tweeked it and found the right screen.<\/p>\n So I run<\/p>\n and sure enough, the fan noise fades itself out. And my battery life index jumps significantly.<\/p>\n Point of caution: Be careful with that sudo. su-DON’T use it unless you know what you’re doing. The ’85’ comes from ps, it’s the pid, or Process ID. And kill terminates the process – the UNIX equivalent of Force Quit (in fact, often works better than Force Quit if something is really misbehaving).<\/p>\n Well, that was an extraordinarily geeky post. Rock & Roll all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, so that was a bit of a sensationalist title. My laptop has not yet exploded. Here’s the deal. I applied the 10.5.3 update to my MacBook a few days ago, when it was released. It took a moment, rebooted, … Continue reading ps aux<\/code><\/p>\nsudo kill 85<\/code><\/p>\n