[marsland]

I have a Dell 4600C mini tower with a variable speed CPU fan. I understand that as the CPU cycles cranks up and the CPU gets hotter, the fan speed will increase. I am used to processes getting stuck on 100% jacking up the fan speed and noise. When I go into the windows task manager and delete the process, the fan speed immediately starts to slow.

Yesterday, I came home and the fan was on high speed (I could tell by the loud noise). I found no stuck processes. I rebooted, and the fan noise was still high speed.

I opened up the case and vacuumed it out (not a lot of dust; certainly nothing caked). I scrubbed the fan blades and blew out the hit sink below it. Upon reboot, the fan was immediately loud. Cold machine, fast fan; something's busted....

One perhaps unrelated incident is I used Registry Mechanic to clean my Registry last week. Doesn't seem to be any direct tie in to the fan, but I throw that out, just in case.

So is this a fan replacement? Or is there some thermal control that has gone wacko?

Thanks.

John

[Advertisements]

well... the dell online chat technical support guy convinced me to replace the fan. So for $30 i'm willing to give it a go. We'll see what happens.. .update in 3 days.

John

[marsland]

well... the dell online chat technical support guy convinced me to replace the fan. So for $30 i'm willing to give it a go. We'll see what happens.. .update in 3 days.

John

[cchotlanta]

well... the dell online chat technical support guy convinced me to replace the fan. So for $30 i'm willing to give it a go. We'll see what happens.. .update in 3 days.

John

John --

What were your results? I've just started having the same problem.

Thanks! ~Carol~

[Mephitus]

have either of you tried installing 'speedfan' and try setting the speed manually?

speedfan even has dell-specific support...


http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

[cchotlanta]

have either of you tried installing 'speedfan' and try setting the speed manually?

speedfan even has dell-specific support...


http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Actually, I did try this, but can't seem to get it to register anything except system info and S.M.A.R.T statistics. It sees two fans at 0%, no temp information, and can't get to chart anything at all. I'm doing something wrong, or I've got a bigger problem.

Thanks for the suggestion, though! ~Carol~

[Mephitus]

did you tick the 'dell support' box in the config? its needed to get dells to work properly...