Hey @webworkings!!!
I'll talk a little about my sad story. A while ago, like a year or so, I happily played some soccer game on my old and low specs laptop on weekends, when it began to get hot the fan rapidly started to spin at different speeds (it sounded like a racing car). Then one day, I noticed FPS loss, lag, struttering, freezing, throttling and all kind of things that can bother you while having fun. I took a look (processes, background apps, antivirus, firewall, WiFi) everything ok, except the fan that wasn't making noise. I wasn't sure if it was a BIOS update that I made by those days, if it was dirty or a damaged fan.
So, I'll list the things I've already done on the past +6 months:
- Updated latest BIOS.
- Enabled/disabled Fan Always On (HP BIOS are very limited).
- Checked Power Options and Cooling Policy on Windows.
- Opened the laptop and cleaned the fan, vents and heatsink. Wasn't dirty because I used compresed air every 2-3 months.
- Installed HP's Cool Sense. Failed because my fan is 2-pin fan and it won't detect it.
- Replaced the fan.
- Made a fresh Windows install on a SSD (Home Basic, less services, lightweight).
- Installed all sort of diagnostic tools (HWMonitor, AIDA64, SpeedFan, etc.).
- Built a big (and noisy) DIY cooling pad with a 12v Cool Master fan (the thing blows air at my face). It dropped from +90C to 79C at full system stress.
- Rolled-back to previous versions of BIOS.
- I considered thermal paste re-apply, but I don't think that would resolve the fan problem.
Believe me, I did a lot of things (many) that I can't remember them all. I'm a software developer and time to time I do basic maintainance to PCs & Laps :]
Anyway, last week, I found that fan speeds could be manipulated modifying the EC regs using a tool named
RWEverything . I was scared because if it was not properly used it could brick my laptop. So by coincidence I read at some forum that it wasn't necesary to take the risk because there was already a tool that could that for you: the mighty
NoteBook FanControl And I tell you why is mighty (at least for me). When I ran the tool and loaded my model default settings (guess what), the fan started to spin at full speed (just like in those glorious days when I wouldn't lose a game because the lag and system unresponsivness). Unfortunetly, this tool would't maintain a constant fan speed because it was interfering with the system's cooling policy, so it would frecuently start and stop and that added more lag to my game. I realized that I needed to take a step further.
Yesterday, I found at
Bios Mods website a modded BIOS that supposedly would unlock all the bios features, I was very excited because I saw somewhere a screenshot showing the Thermal/Power Options for another model, so I said "This is it!". Downloaded, flashed, rebooted and then I desperately started to press F10 "Yeah!!! Yeah!!!", and, much for my disappointment (or deception)... there where only a few new options available: IDE, SATA, ROM and some other boot settings, no Thermal/Power Options... (I swear I heard The Joker laughting at me). It felt like a punch in the chest, so that's why internally hardwiring my humble 2-wire fan to a USB rail is the last resort for me. Wiring it ouside doesn't guarantee that the fan will start when I turn on the lap, or someone could unplug the fan and cause a GPU/CPU melt.
Yeah, poor me, but I've run out of options.
Thanks for your time
I really wish more laptops came with better cooling systems.
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