Compaq 610 fan is constantly on and noisy, base is fairly hot too

Question

The fans on both of my HP Compaq 610s are constantly on and the base is fairly hot and I don't know if this is standard issue. HP assures me that this is unusual and that I should return them as DOA.

Because both laptops have this problem, I'm thinking that this might be a design flaw rather than a one-off problem.

I've updated the BIOS and using their recommended power settings.

Am I missing something? Is there anything I can do to fix it?

Has anyone else had this problem?

Answer 1

Possible causes and next steps:

• Dust in the system, preventing heat dissipation.
  • Turn off the laptop and use compressed air to try to clear the dust.
• A process is keeping the CPU at or near full use. If your CPU has power management it will be running hotter than usual.
  • Use a program like Task Manager or Process Explorer to determine what program is causing excessive use of the CPU.
• A process is using the GPU heavily causing it to produce heat.
  • I am currently not sure how to determine the program that may be causing this issue.

Answer 2

Try SpedFan it's very competent but can be a bit complicated to use.

SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature). SpeedFan can access digital temperature sensors and can change fan speeds accordingly, thus reducing noise. SpeedFan can find almost any hardware monitor chip connected to the 2-wire SMBus (System Management Bus (trademark belonging to SMIF, Inc.), a subset of the I2C protocol) and works fine with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Windows Vista. It works with Windows 64 bit too.