Laptop Fan Always On

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nice acoustic risers, though.

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!

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.

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.