Laptop Fan Always On

kevhed72

So my corporate issued laptop has the faster processor option for us peons, but home office doubles as my audio room. The fan never turns off and, first world problem this may be....turning on and off the laptop takes 10 minutes. Oh, the drudgery I know but....the fan noise drives me insane. Any solutions to my first world problems??

Clipdat

What is the make and model of the laptop?

kevhed72

Dell Lattitude 5590 with the smokin i7 processor

Clipdat

Is the BIOS up to date?

kevhed72

I have no clue.....it has done this forever.
I never notice at the office because all the other background noise with also drives me bananas.
I have issues....

Jstas

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=dell+latitude+5590+fan+running+constantly

kevhed72

Thanks guys....I will try updating the BIOS after talking to our tech guy. This looks to be a common issue with this series of laptops.

mrbigbluelight

Pretty obvious to me that your laptop is infested with gremlins.
You need to grab your family and pets and leave the house immeditely then call the police.
They'll handle the situation appropriately.

Jstas

Nah, hit it with a hammer. It'll all be cool.

- this PSA brought to you by the Percussive Maintenance Engineer's Local 236

Emlyn

My employer bought a boatload of $2K HP laptops and has had to replace most of them after a couple years usage. The fan running constantly is an early sign of the battery going bad in those. Too much battery in too little space without enough heat dissipation. The battery would overheat, swell up, and crack the laptop case open. Advice from IT was to turn the laptop off and go get a new one while they were still under warranty.

msg

Curious, does the fan run all the time even if you don't have any apps running?

What surface do you have it set up on? Try placing the notebook on a cutting board or something, and elevate the rear corners of the laptop to get better airflow under it. If you have it sitting on a blanket or the couch, go ahead and smack yourself across the chops with a chainmail glove.

Does it have integrated video (Intel) or something else like Nvidia or AMD?

I've seen this before on some machines if there's a browser tab open to something "graphic intensive", like YouTube.

Could also be apps running in the background you're not aware of. Tidal and Spotify may kick up processing/graphics if hardware acceleration is enabled. For example, Chrome has a setting to "continue running background apps when Chrome is closed".

You could also try starting up in Safe Mode with Networking. You might not be able to do much in this mode, but if the fan doesn't run constantly in Safe Mode, it could be a service or process causing the high fan activity, and potentially not a hardware issue.

Jstas

Honestly, it's a 5590 and already a couple years old, at least. I'm pretty sure they stopped selling the 55XX series in late 2018. It's very likely that the battery is crapping out and the excess heat it is causing is creating a heat issue that makes the fan run constantly.

My Surface Pro 3 is starting to have similar issues, I may need to get work to replace it. I waiting to see if the battery bulge manifests. At that point, it'll be a priority replacement before failure and/or fire happen.

Kex

I had a very similar laptop to that until recently. It’s a fairly decent laptop (very good technical review HERE, if you’re into that sort of thing — including details about noise)

I would check Task Manager to see what’s running, especially the load on your CPU and RAM. We did use some proprietary software that would drive it nuts 🥜 so that it would wheeze and blow like crazy until I shut that software down. Otherwise, upon startup, for example, or when idle (no open applications, including browser windows), it was almost dead silent.

The other thing you can do is install a utility to see if the fan is running because the internals are hot, or if it’s just running for no apparent reason. You can download Piriform Speccy (from the creators of CCleaner) HERE. It doesn’t work with all laptops, or may only work partially with some. It is very light on resources, and easy to install.

Also, how much RAM is installed? Should really be no less than 16GB for Windows.

msg

Jstas wrote: »

Honestly, it's a 5590 and already a couple years old, at least. I'm pretty sure they stopped selling the 55XX series in late 2018. It's very likely that the battery is crapping out and the excess heat it is causing is creating a heat issue that makes the fan run constantly.

Sure, may very well be, just offering a few simple things to check.

I like those Dell 55xx series laptops a lot. Well configured initially and with care and use of Dell OE power adapters, they can go 3 to 5 years easy, obviously less time without a battery change if full battery run time is a requirement. I remember the first 55xx series I set up. I couldn't get over the battery life on it. Core i5 quad with 8GB memory and NVMe. Very responsive, as well. Definitely agree on the 16GB these days, though.

Oh, Kev, another thing to check is the Power Configuration. If it's set for High Performance and not Balanced or something similar, it could be keeping all resources locked into the fastest performance state.

The BIOS recommendation was good, too. Check that all drivers are up to date for that matter.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us?app=drivers

Just like before starting an exercise regimen, check with your IT dept. to make sure they're cool with you doing this stuff. Shadow IT is sketchy.

kevhed72

Power configuration....didn't think of that one.
I do know we have layers upon layers of security software loaded on all computers, which even my tech guy complains about. We had a pretty bad hack some years ago so, like anything, we go overboard with checks and balances, so to speak.

Kex

FWIW, I always kept my Dell set on maximum performance, because battery life was never a priority. It still wasn’t noisy unless I was using demanding software.

codycatalist

I have a Dell Latitude 74XX and haven't had an issue with the cooling fan unless I am opening a file with over a million lines of data. I do make sure to push my dell firmware and driver updates through consistently. If not it gets ALL sorts of wonky.

sucks2beme

a couple of things.
You can crank down the speed to lower heat.
Other thing that kills laptops- not enough ram.
Disk swaps caused by not enough ram make it work a lot harder
I hope it came with an SSD drive. That helps.
I have an older Dell and increasing ram and going to a SSD
improved things a lot. They tried to give me a newer mini Dell.
12" screen, slower than my older laptop with a 15" screen.
Cute but useless. A lot slower. I kept the older laptop.
They will be back around to hand out an even smaller pad style
with a keyboard. The expectation is you store everything online.
It doesn't even have a hard network port. I go a lot of places where I
need to jack into the hard network. Once again, they thing smaller is better.

msg

Figure anything out on this Kev, or still running like a bayou swamp boat?

kevhed72

I spent way too much time yesterday with Dell tech support and tried everything under the sun....BIOS update, diagnostic scans, blew out the vents, and just finished the 3 plus hour Windows 10 the company push out to us. None of this fixed the issue and I really dont want the hassle of getting a new laptop right now, so I went low tech. The laptop now sits on floor way below ear level: (I knew I kept all that extra carpeting for a reason😂)

msg

jeez dahm crazy.
Did they mention anything about it being a known issue?

Nice acoustic risers, though.

BlueFox

How hard is it to get inside and disconnect it?

VR3

I know with my laptop, at ten years old, the only way to get the fan to stop running is to open the body and blow all of the dust out inside. Blowing the vents don't do anything for it

Mine is a Sony Vaio i7, 256 gig ssd, 8 gigs of ram, still does what I need it to!

kevhed72

msg wrote: »

jeez dahm crazy.
Did they mention anything about it being a known issue?

Nice acoustic risers, though.

I asked if they get alot of calls about the fan and "Rob", my tech rep, gave me the silent treatment.

Kex

That’s ridiculous - none of those cookie cutter answers from “tech support” 🙄 ever work - but you’re probably not going to escape getting a new laptop eventually.

Did you try installing the Speccy utility? That will at least give you temperature readings from the internal sensors, so you’ll know how hot it’s getting. If the CPU is always “in the red”, it’s only a matter of time before you start getting BSOD errors.

machone

Clean the fan heat exchangers. I have a couple of Dell Precisions that I just cleaned and it made a huge difference.

Gardenstater

I've heard that the silver thermal paste used between the CPU and the heatsinks does deteriorate with time. Not sure if I personally buy that but if you wanted to go to the trouble to open the case and blow out all the dust, you could also clean off and refresh the thermal paste. There's also an art to using just the right (minimal) amount and they don't necessarily always do things right at the factory.

machone

This is typical dust build up on heat exchangers after a few years.