Three year old HP laptop, fan has always been noisy but this is new. I have tried everything I have found via Google to stop the fan but nothing is working. If I put the laptop on battery the fan stops almost immediately but as soon as its plugged in it starts again. There is no difference in the power setting for System Cooling. Any suggestions other than tearing it apart?
Yep clearly something is causing it, can't figure out what. I imagine it will either burn itself out/fail at some point if this keeps up.
Download OpenHarwareMonitor.
Extract to C:\Program Files (x86)\HardwareMonitor and run OpenHarwareMonitor.exe
It will track the temperatures (current, min & Max). Unfortunately laptops don't monitor fan speed.
You can configure what to show on the gadget and try.
You can set to run on startup
OpenHardwareMonitor is an excellent tool to track performance/temperature-related faults.
A quick and easy check, especially if you're noticing a profound difference between powering on AC & battery, would be to get familiar with the built-in task manager.
Launch the task manager, click on the Processes tab, and then click the top bar at the CPU column to sort from highest to lowest.
Spend time studying the relative numbers you see while on battery, maybe grab a few screen captures for reference, and then do the same while plugged into AC.
There shouldn't be any difference seen on the task manager between the power sources, if the power configuration settings are exactly the same, however; you may see the cpu% much higher while on AC.
As pointed out by Ghot, there could be differences set in the power configuration area that will generate more heat and get the fan wailing.
These different configurations could result in an increased cpu% and if you see this increase, this will likely confirm a configuration difference to be found and adjusted, if you so choose.
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