Solved! Laptop fan stuck on full speed

[jamesjosephfrankland]

Hi,

I have an Asus X550L laptop which I've had for about 3 years. This morning when I switched it on the fan was constantly running at full speed and wouldn't slow down to a normal speed like it usually does. I haven't done anything to the laptop between yesterday, when it didn't do this, and this morning.

So far I've tried turning the laptop off and on again, and leaving it unplugged with no battery for an hour. I also checked if the fan had any device drivers, I found it doesn't appear in the device manager as a device and so it doesn't appear to have drivers. I also checked to see if windows had updated lately, which it hadn't.

Then I tried installing Speed FAN which showed that the CPU and GPU are at roughly 30 degrees Celsius and aren't really doing anything strenuous, but the fan is running at around 3700RPM. SpeedFAN couldn't find any speed controllers for the fan even though I know there must be one because the fan speed usually varies based on the CPU temperature. Because no controller is showing up there are no speed settings in Speed FAN that I could potentially use.

I've also tried looking for the fan settings in the Aptio BIOS (?) menu, but I couldn't find anything resembling them. Apparently they should be in the power menu, but it doesn't show up as a tab.

Any help would be much appreciated.

James

 

[jaydax]

Do you by any chance own a cat? Cat hair floats around in the air and eventually gets sucked into the laptop by the cooling fan. It lodges between the fan and the cooling fins and acts as a filter trapping dust. Since this slows the airflow the fan increases speed to try to keep the laptop cool.
You can try using a vacuum cleaner hose to suck it out from the air intake. You can try blowing it out by blasting air into the outlet. If you have a great deal of patience you can try hooking out the 'filter' using a hook made from stiff fishing line or thin strimmer line. Failing that the only solution is to dismantle the laptop to clean out the plug of dust. This is NOT an easy fix. You'll need to be technically competent and look for online instructions for how to dismantle the laptop. It's easy to go wrong and trash your laptop!

 

[jamesjosephfrankland]

Do you by any chance own a cat? Cat hair floats around in the air and eventually gets sucked into the laptop by the cooling fan. It lodges between the fan and the cooling fins and acts as a filter trapping dust. Since this slows the airflow the fan increases speed to try to keep the laptop cool.
You can try using a vacuum cleaner hose to suck it out from the air intake. You can try blowing it out by blasting air into the outlet. If you have a great deal of patience you can try hooking out the 'filter' using a hook made from stiff fishing line or thin strimmer line. Failing that the only solution is to dismantle the laptop to clean out the plug of dust. This is NOT an easy fix. You'll need to be technically competent and look for online instructions for how to dismantle the laptop. It's easy to go wrong and trash your laptop!

Hi, it could potentially be something like this. I do have a cat that likes to sit next to the outlet vent for my computer. However in Easter I had used compressed air to clear the vent, which I thought had done the trick.

The temperature reading for the CPU cores stays at around 40 degrees C when the CPU is idling, but increases to around 60 degrees C at 50% load, but the fan speed doesn't vary at all. This leads me to think it's an issue with the fan speed controller rather than the CPU getting too hot though.