Re: Noisy cooling fan

[Dirk Reiss <d.reiss@tu-bs.de>]

Hi Dan,

On Thursday 02 December 2004 16:49, Dan Davison wrote:
> I have a year-old laptop with a pentium 4, running Debian testing with
> kernel 2.6.6. After an initial 5 minutes of calm after booting, the
> cooling fan comes on and remains on in a state of relatively high
> activity; it is very noisy). 
> 
> Oddly, for the last two weeks, it worked every day in quiet or inactive
> fan states, unless given something very processor-intensive to do. I was
> using the /proc/acpi/processor interface to throttle down the processor
> when I didn't need high speed and this certainly has the effect of
> reducing performance. It was my impression that it also helped reduce the
> fan activity during the two-week "quiet spell". However it's now back to
> its vacuum-cleaner sort of level of noise (after the initial 5 minutes
> after boot), and throttling the processor right down to minimum seems to
> have no effect on the fan activity, although it still controls
> performance.

As you seem to be able to access acpi correctly, i would suggest to use a tool 
like cpufreqd or cpudyn to automatically increase/lower performance. It works 
quite fine here on my laptop and keeps the cpu at a moderate temperature. 
Maybe that helps to keep the fan inactive.

Hth,
Cheers,

Dirk