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dtforhan
Participant
September 4, 2009
Question

Flash Player Causes Overheating?

  • September 4, 2009
  • 14 replies
  • 50077 views

Until relatively recently (a month or so ago?)  I had absolutely no problem watching embedded videos.  Then, out of nowhere, my laptop started shutting down every time I tried to watch a Flash video online.  I eventually realized the problem was auto-shutdown due to massive overheating - my laptop's normal temperature while browsing is around 60-70 C, and any time I watch a Flash video (especially any sort of high-quality Flash video) this jumps up to about 95 C for a few minutes before auto-shutdown.  If I leave the Flash video running in a minimized window or an un-focused tab (anywhere where it isn't rendering to the screen), the temperature returns to more reasonable but still seemingly high levels (about 85 C).

This seems crazy to me, considering I can run several hi-def videos simultaneously offline (using Windows Media Player Classic)  without my laptop breaking a sweat.  I've made sure I have the latest Flash Player updates, and I've tried a number of browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari), with nearly identical results in every one.  I can't watch most videos online anymore, and nothing besides Flash Player causes my laptop to overheat like this, including 3D modeling/animation software and video processing/editing software.  Can somebody help me out here?  Does anybody know what's going on with this?

Thanks in advance for any help -

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    billybobjcv-7YP6j0
    Participating Frequently
    September 30, 2009

    The same thing happens to me.  http://forums.adobe.com/thread/494975?tstart=90

    Your work PCs might be more powerful and/or have dual cores that don't cause the CPU to spike to 100%, or perhaps they just have better cooling.  I find it VERY hard to believe Adobe can't reproduce this problem in-house - it happens to me on 2 different vintage machines that are configured completely differently, and it can be observed using Firefox, Chrome or IE.  I suggest the Adobe engineers try going to facebook and playing some Fishworld!

    W
    WLBuilders
    Participant
    September 25, 2009

    We get this as well on a P4 playing flash based games.  Is it bad programming on the developers side?

    It's funny as it doesn't happen on our work PC's.

    C
    coolzoda
    Participant
    September 25, 2009

    same thing happens to me, I can watch youtube but if i watch my space viedo my computer will overheat and shut down in 20 minutes, i freeze a bottle of water and put it inside my computer that extended the limit to 30+ mins....

    boot up the computer again, cool down for 5 mins with my cpu fan on, then watch again.

    Something is not right here

    A
    Anonymous
    September 4, 2009

    I've heard of this, but we've never been able to make it happen in house.  And we test many thousands of pages of SWF content daily.

    So I'm not sure what to advise.  If you were in San Francisco we might be able to arrange to take a look..

    One thing you could do is uninstall (using the uninstall app), then get Flash Player 9 from the archived players technote and see if it stops happening...


    If you're interested in going to that level of troubleshooting, please open a web support case (http://www.adobe.com/support/contact) and post back the case #.

    D
    dtforhanAuthor
    Participant
    September 12, 2009

    Ok, I tried Flash Player 9, with almost no change in temperature - so I finally bought some compressed air, opened up my laptop, and cleaned out the air intake, fan, & heat sink.  This cleaning reduced my average laptop temperature by about 10-15 C down to a much more comfortable level (~50-55 C).

    The dramatic increase in temperature still happens when running Flash Player (it jumps up from 50-55 C to about 80 C), but this temperature is now within my laptop's operational limits, and shutdown no longer occurs.

    So yeah, thanks for the response, I hope my experience might help anybody else with this issue - though I do have to admit that I still find it kind of puzzling that Flash Player is the only piece of software on my computer that causes this kind of temperature increase.

    G
    gdub9688795
    Participant
    September 14, 2009

    Flash is definitely causing my MBP a meltdown!!!  For a flash site like youtube or hulu or espn.com or any site similar, my CPU usage goes +100% and it's all the webkit flash plugin in Safari.

    I've updated to 10.6.1 with the latest flash plugin and still the same results.  The only thing I can do is avoid flash sites all together until you guys at Adobe recognize the problem and put out a fix.. which I suppose will be never so thanks a lot for overheating my hardware.

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