E6410 Fan Behavior

I'm hoping someone can help me with some confusion I have on the fan on my E6410. I'm not sure if the behavior is normal or not.

Basically, here is what happens. When I first log in, the fan is completely off and the temperature is around 98F or so. Slowly, the temperature climbs to above 130F (or maybe it's 140F) and the fan kicks on and cools it back down to below 100F, then the fan turns off.

The part that is strange to me is that this happens with no open programs or usage at all. Even though nothing is running, the temperature still climbs. I thought that the fan would only kick on when it's under load, not while it's idling and doing nothing. (CPU usage is about 5% or less, with occasional jumps to 8% on idle).

I've tried blowing out the vents, and I've tried both Windows 7 (fresh install) and Linux (also fresh install) and both have the same problem, so I don't think it's software related. This may just be the way the E6410 is, but I'm not sure.

It's possible that I'm just noticing this more because I've been taking it to the library, which is extremely quiet and makes the fan noise stand out more (my home has a lot of ambient noise, with TV's going all the time). But lately the fan just seems to come on every five minutes or so and it drives me nuts.

 

It happens to me a lot. From what I've seen, there hasn't been much help. Check out here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/475324-e6410-owners-thread-276.html

 

Do you have Nvidia or Intel graphics? Also, is your BIOS the latest version, A09?

If the fan noise is a problem, replace your thermal grease with Arctic Silver 5. Most of the time, my fan is on slow speed.

 

Be aware that thermal grease replacement will probably void the warranty.

 

The laptop has Intel graphics, and I do have the latest BIOS. Considering I have the 5-year complete care warranty, I'm not in a hurry to void it...

 

Keep in mind that in the Windows environment, the largest resource consumer, on average, is Windows itself. When you log in, you kick off dozens of processes. So when you think that no programs are running, there are typically 60 or more programs running. The act of logging in kicks off most of them, but many will be running as soon as the machine boots, and no one has logged in yet.

On my machine I just replaced the fan, booted, and I launched one program (firefox). I now have 107 processes running.

So this is normal. As you add software to the system, the number of processes running during idle goes up. This is a design "problem" on the part of the software developers, as everyone seems to think it is ok to launch boot-time daemons to check for updates, and to leave those processes running all the time. This is on top of the operating system that has huge levels of bloat. But it is not unique to windows, even an efficient Linux machine has dozens of processes running even before the user has touched the machine.

George

 

Thanks for the response. It seems to me that the fan is distracting. When I'm at home I don't notice it, but at the library, it seems so loud I wonder if it's going to draw attention to me. I now also have an E6420 (I still have the E6410) and at the library it doesn't seem so loud so I don't notice it as much.