Laptop fan never turns off, please help.

Francisco Figueiredo Jr. fxjrlists at yahoo.com.br
Wed Jul 21 15:24:12 UTC 2004


--- Erik Hemdal <ehemdal at townisp.com> escreveu: 
> 
> > On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 23:38, Francisco Figueiredo Jr. wrote:
> > > Hi all.
> > > 
> > > I just bought a Gateway m350 notebook and installed fc2 in it. Now I
> noticed
> > > that my fan doesn't turn off. Is there something I can do about it? I
> found
> > > many references about that with toshiba notebooks in archives, but
> nothing
> > > about other laptops fans.
> > >
> 
> Francisco, do you know for certain that the fan turned off before you
> installed FC2?  Newer laptops run the fan continuously, whether on AC or
> not.  My Dell always runs the fan, but it is slow and nearly silent. 
> When the system gets hot, the fan screams at high speed.  Finally the
> CPU will clock down, which cools the system a lot. Then the fan slows
> down again.
> 

Hi Erik, thanks for your reply.
Yes, I know for certain because as it came with windows xp installed, I could
see that when I booted it up, the the laptop started with fan on, later after
some type in windows, it turned off. If I did some work with disk or cpu load,
it turned on again and later turned off. I know this only because the noise it
did when it was turned on. :)

Another think I noticed is that I could see in /proc/acpi/fan/ that I have
three fans but only fan 1 is on the other two are off. Is it possible that acpi
would never turned them on?? I mean, do I run any risk of having my laptop
burned out because of that??


> >  
> > > Could you point me where can I get my fan to turn off correctly?? I mean,
> turn
> > > off and turn on depending on temperature automatically?
> > > 
> > > ACPI is working as I can get laptop battery status and I have /proc/acpi
> > > available.
> 
> This is a good bit of information.  ACPI and APM are both enabled by
> default, so simply checking services isn't going to tell the tale.  But
> when the battstat is good, it's a good bet that power management is
> happy.
> 

Yeap, I can see in dmesg that it says: APM overriden by ACPI.

> Check the following points.  I can't offer you a definitive answer, but
> these might help:
> 
> Is the laptop hot to the touch?  Not all laptops are fitted with
> "mobile" chipsets, so they run hotter (I learned this the hard way).  If
> that's the case, you'll find the fan running harder and longer.  I
> wouldn't be surprised if that turns into "continuously".
> 

Nope, it is not hot to touch. In fact it is not that hot. I think it is normal.
I'm worried because I thought that fc2 could be misusing the fans and this
could burnout my laptop.

Also, as the fan keeps on all the time, my battery time suffers a lot :(


> Does the system slow down when on battery or after running a while? 
> This may indicate that the CPU is throttled for thermal control.
> 

I didn't notice any slow down. I also could not get throttle info from
/proc/acpi/processor... it says not supported. This may be caused because I'm
using the 2.6.5 kernel? I'm downloading 2.6.7 to see if I get better support.


> Are there other problems or glitches with the system?  CPU's do crazy
> things when they overheat.  If you aren't seeing strange behavior, this
> also might suggest that the fan is supposed to be on.
> 

Nope, I don't see any strange behaviour for while.
I'm working on it right now, and I hope it doesn't have any problem.

Can I do anything else to get more control over fans?


Thanks Erik.


Regards,

Francisco Figueiredo Jr.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 





More information about the fedora-list mailing list