Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Hyper Fan Mode in the Morning

Oh, how I have come to dread the sound of fans on my laptop in the morning!:

Walk to my office. Dock my HP 8530W laptop. Power on.

And hear the dread sound of fans going full bore. Laptop hung.

I dread this sound, since I know that it will take 10-15 minutes to get o a place where I can start work.

It is curious that both my much maligned Toshiba M400 tablet, and my employer provided HP 8530W laptop, have the same "ultra-fan" mode symptom of death. Since they have different OSes - Vista in the former, XP in the latter - it suggests that the problem is not the OS per se, but some common component. Since they have different manufacturers, it suggests that it is not manufacturer specific. Probably some common software, such as a Microsoft power management utility common to both OS versions.

1 comment:

Nolan said...

There are two likely possibilities here:
1) If the OS (presumably via executing some AML) doesn't poke a chipset register every N seconds, the fans go into turbo mode for safety.
2) The OS is spinning the CPU (cli; hlt is hard, lets go shopping) as a result of some panic or other disaster, which drives up the temp and causes the fans to go nuts.

Both of these seem like common rational responses that OS writes might implement.