[Guide] How to control fans on Dell Laptops under Windows

Yes. If you want a GUI app instead you can use the one from the first post in this thread. Replacing bzh_dell_smm_io_x64.sys with the one from my package will allow it to run without the testsigning mode stuff. (The registry change mentioned a few posts up will still be needed.)

 

Blah, I'm a total liar. Secure boot was off. When I turned it on, it behaved like everyone else's (refusing to load the driver), fixed by the registry change mentioned by @maffle a few posts up.

 

@Aaron44126 I updated the bios to 1.7.0 on the 9570 and now it doesnt work anymore... (kinda). dGPU activity would still trigger the fans with bios 1.7.0 regardless of the register overwrite. Wonder if there is now maybe a new one, or they just forget to program it the same way, and the old register is now ignored. I just hate Dell. Went back to 1.6.0 and it is working again. So bios 1.6.0 will be the last one for me I guess. Sigh...

 

So far it works on the E6540, kudos to you mate!

 

@maffle . . . congrats on getting this working. You guys did nice work there. And I know what you mean about cat and mouse with Dell. My next and final project on the 9360 is probably going to be to roll back the bios far enough that you still had the option to "force S3 sleep." I really don't like "modern" anything, and I want that back. And apparently when I get it back, according to discussion on Dell's forums, I'll then have to work around a USB bug that causes S3 to leach power -- though it seems manageable.

The gripe seems to be that Dell, which posted that it took away S3 as part of a campaign to eliminate "certain redundancies," doesn't want to fix the bug. Or that it's all Microsoft's fault. Depends on your point of view, I suppose.

At some point, I may try to have a conversation with somebody at Dell about this . . . there's really no need to make some of this so hard. But I'm not holding my breath -- this is stuff you're not supposed to try at home.

Still, I must say, the 9360 quad core is really nice once you mod it to deal with the thermals and put in a bigger, faster SSD. Snappy, quiet, and thanks to you guys, under control . . . mostly.

Congrats on your bug hunt. I didn't understand all of it, but it really was fun watching you and Aaron track down the problem.

Mike

 

Alienware Command Center is available to download for new G5 and G7. I tested it on my 7577. It installs, but does not find any compaitible hardware so no fan control is available. Maybe someone skilled could hack this software and make use of it...

 

So I went with the solution of using the old cmd file and "disable driver signature enforcement" for a whole while now and it was "ok" but I got a lot of bluescreens saying "irql not less or equal", so I disabled it. Yesterday I had some time at work and thought why not have a look in the forum again, maybe someone has a solution....
And wow I got to say @maffle and @Aaron44126 you guys took me on quite the journey
Great job @maffle for getting the driver on HWinfo and awesome work with the CMD-tool @Aaron44126, thank you guys so much.
I love HWinfo but I can't use it as daily driver for fan control as it doesn't have hysteresis....
So far the CMD-tool and SpeedFan solution works great, no bluescreens
@Aaron44126 maybe you can upload the script files also, as I'm not that advanced in working with those. One seems to be a batch file and the other some xml....
Also I have an idea:
Maybe we can get the developer of SpeedFan to implement the driver the same way as with HWinfo.
Wouldn't that solve all the issues?

 

Indeed, I haven't tried to reach out to the SpeedFan author (and AFAIK no one else has either). I'm not sure how active SpeedFan development is since the last version was posted in 2016. But if he did implement the EC control commands then the command-line tool and related scheduled tasks to get it to turn fan control on and off would be unnecessary.

 

Attached: The XML files are Windows Task Scheduler jobs (you can import them) and the BAT files are simple command-line scripts. These were taken "raw" from my current setup. You'll have to adjust file paths and your user account SID if you want to have yours working the same way.

 

It kinda now has in the latest beta, because I asked to implement it. It now has a spin-down time in seconds you can set. So if for example the first temp value was triggered, and then you set a spin-down timer of 30 seconds, it will spin for 30 seconds, even the temps were now below the lowest toggle point.