Chosen Solution
I’ll try and make this short but this is a LONG journey with a ton of information. During a tune up (cleaning dust and installing new RAM and solid state) in my 2010 macbook pro, i forgot to unplug the battery before i began work. This ultimately fried the backlight fuse and an inductor and capacitor on the WLAN circuit.
After repairing both i power on my mac and it is INCREDIBLY SLOW-like unbearable, the fans are also at maximum speed. I check activity monitor and well
kernel_task is using litterally %600 of my cpu. Kernel_task is a process that takes away from other processes to reduce cpu temperature to prevent overheating , its part of macOS. My issue is the computer is litterally almost idle besides entrcheck.
i know my hard drive (technically actually a solid state) isn’t failing because its brand new. The Ram is also a known good component. The twist: this all happens when the bottom case is on, if i remove the bottom cover and start the computer, it boots and runs like a dream. Im so confused and frustrated ive been at this for days now. what ive done reset SMC, PRAM, Swapped Ram and Hard Drive, spent hours on this doing research, please help, ive spent so long trying to get this thing up and running again. Id hate to just give up, but i dont know what else to do. UPDATE 10/26/2021 after running the same diagnostics (TG PRO and Entrecheck) here are my results WITHOUT the back cover on
UPDATE UPDATE 10/26/2021 upon putting the back cover on, and taking it off and noticing the difference. I see the the palm rest temp sensor (located inside the trackpad flex cable) does not respond with the case on. This part has been ordered, will update after replacement.
Thanks to @danj for his support and assistance in this journey. I solved the problem. See the item marked in red.
upon investigation i noticed it was a little foam pad glued to the front camera ribbon cable . It would be pushed down when the case is closed, and pushing on it gently replicated the issue. This little foam pad prevents the metal case from touching the metal camera ribbon cable. For some reason the top of the case pushing this little pad caused my fan speed to go to 6000 rpms, and for kernel_task to take all of my cpu usage
yes….THAT… was the problem…. I removed the pad and the macbook works wonderfully. I suspect that foam pad prevents electrical connections. So i didn’t want to leave it like that. So I covered the connection with some thick electrical tape to achieve a similar effect. And will put a smaller pad on later…..then Voilà! My macbook is back! Thanks to everyone who spent their time helping me. My solution is a unique case. Anyone else experienced this issue. I suggest SAFELY starting your computer up without nonessential components 1 at a time. Speakers, keyboard, trackpad. When i got to the camera. I noticed the problem stopped when the camera wasn’t connected, which lead me to the small pad. Im not sure why it was causing all those issues. But i suspect maybe the pad was just too big and pressed down causing a short, I’ll probably never know…
Well your systems SMC services is in CPU Safe Mode which is when SMC’s sensors are not communicating to SMC because of a disconnection or failed sensor or the sensor is detecting a out of spec value (temp, current or voltage) Do you have something disconnected? Battery, camera, display or drive? If you do make sure they are connected. You need to run deeper diagnostics! Depending on what the OS version is running on your system you might encounter a problem running the onboard diagnostics, as Apple messed it up with the newer firmware update within the newer macOS versions. But, let’s give it a try! Restart your system and press the D key to enter into the onboard diagnostics Reference Mac startup key combinations Hopefully you can get an error code to aim us to the area thats in trouble. If that fails you’ll need to find the original Grey CD that came with the system it will have an older version of diagnostics which should still work. Or, you’ll need the service diagnostics for your system its hard to find as Apple does a search and destroy on anyone posting it online. So the last option and in some ways easier! Is to install the full version of this app TG Pro while it still not a complete diagnostics it might be enough to figure things out. Let us know what the diagnostics tells you and/or post a snapshot of the TG Pro’s main screen with all of the sensors and fan showing Adding images to an existing question Update (10/22/2021) Ouch! If the GPU logic is failing (the GPU sensor is not reporting in the TG Pro diagnostics) then your logic board will need replacing as the sensor is within the NVIDIA GeForce 320M chip. This is a unique GPU chip as its also the PCH logic for your system.
MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2010 Logic Board Replacement
