HP Pavilion dv6 noisy fan [SOLVED]

[monorhesus]

I bought an HP Pavilion dv6 5 months ago and I installed Fedora 14. Very nice integration with Linux, but the fan seemed to be a problem because it was always running and the laptop was usually very hot.

I made extensive research on this problem (mainly due to my girlfriends I've-had-it-with-your-fan-thingy attitude). I eventually switched to Debian and the problem continued. I had ruled out a distro-specific problem, and apparently it was not related to the way the Linux kernel handles the fan because it is a widespread problem among Windows users too.

I thought I had pin-pointed down the problem to a BIOS update needed for my machine, and was about to reinstall Windows to update the BIOS (which I was already weary of doing) when alas, I found a simple solution that I want to share because it made my life so much better:

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Go to the BIOS setting of your computer, and look for the option marked as "Fan Always On" and disable it. That's it.
***

My laptop runs silently now, and apparently it was the fan running all the time which was making it really hot. I've been monitoring my CPU's temperature with my hands and $acpi -V, and it is running way cooler than before. I guess it makes sense to have this fan setting when you're running Windows with all its bloat, but with Linux disabling this feature works really well, at least on my laptop using Debian squeeze.

It is awesome to have a silent laptop and a happy girlfriend again.

I know it might be weird to start a thread for an issue that is already solved, but I wanted to share this in case I can save anybody out there time.

[Rubberman]

Thanks for the post. This may help a lot of people with these type of systems.

[Achin]

Thanks for sharing the information. I too have the same dv6 notebook. So would you not recommend shutting the fan off for windows?