I have a DELL inspiron 6000 with Vista ultimate installed on it. I recently noticed that while the PC is up, the cooling fan (or the CPU fan?) is ON about 80% of the time, even when the CPU is at 2 or 3%. Sometimes, I see this even when the CPU is 0%. Does anyone have any idea on what may be going on here? Thanks!
Well, generally, laptops don't have a whole lot of room for air movement. In order to keep the components from getting too warm, they tend to rely on fans a bit more. Additionally, unlike typical desktops, the size of fans available are smaller and need to spin at higher speeds to move enough air to keep the parts at a safe temperature. 0% CPU activity doesn't instantly translate into a slower cooling fan, as they're most likely temperature controlled.
Agreed.. That depends one many things: The environment weather, the surface where its laying and many other variables.
I always use my laptop on a hard surface so that it has enough space for the airflow. and the cooling vent is not under the laptop like some laptops do. I have seen my wife's laptop (Sony Vaio) and I rarely hear any fan soung although she uses her laptop more! Mine is a DELL.
Additionally to all that has been said up to this point, the fan amount is usually like 2< which have to cool the whole computer. that naturally translates into 24/7 fan spinning. All the heat-generating components - CPU, video card and others have heatpipes leading to just one radiator and one fan that's cooling that radiator. I have not seen any laptop whose fan isn't spinning. If you think that your fan is spinning too much, then you could of course try to reapply some heatpaste on the cpu/vga, but that's some bit of work...
