sl500 - cooling fan never stops

[bxx75]

Hi,

I've just bought my sl500. I am generally satisfied with it.

Nevertheless, there's one thing that worries me.

The CPU cooling fan never stops.

I've upgraded the bios to the latest version 1.25 but the fan still works endlessly.

My sl500 specs:

CPU - Intel Core2 Duo T5870 2.00 GHz 64 bit

GPU - Nvidia Geforce G 105M

RAM - 4 GB

I'd like to know if that's normal behavior for this model or something's wrong and I should give my notebook back to the dealer under the terms of the warranty.

Regards

Bart

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

download TPfancontrol and see what your CPU and GPU temperature is. 

[bxx75]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess tpfancontrol is a windows tool.

I use Linux which has tools to display temperatures.

So, while normal work, i.e. no games, no dvds, no divx films, no other haevy loading software:

CPU 39-40 Celsius

GPU 48-49 Celsius

[bxx75]

And some more additional infomation:

OS - Linux Fedora 12 64 bit

Latest Nvidia Linux driver 195.36.15

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

at that temperature range, the fan shouldn't be on all the time.

Do you experience the same behaviour when you leave the laptop in bios menu over extended time?

[bxx75]

Ok, so what I did was - rebooted the laptop, entered the bios menu, left the computer in the bios menu for about 15 min.

The fan didn't stop.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor · Accepted solution]

that would suggest your heatsink is clogged with dusts or something, you should get the warranty department to fix the issue. 

[Gruftl]

Hi,

i'm using the SL500 about 2 years. The fan was running quit silent until 2 months ago. Since then fan noise started getting too loud, fan rotation was most times on a high level. For example while browsing with Firefox. First I thought there some program/task running in the background. But it wasn't. After searching the internet and watching the processes I came to no conclusion for that phenomena.So I decided to check the fan physically, opened the notebook and removed the fan. I found a layer of dust between the fan exit and the grid before the ventilating shaft in the notebook side. After I cleared that grid from the dust layer everything worked fine. Maybe it would have been enough hto use the hoover at he tiny slit between fan box and and the ventilating shaft. But from outside at the ventilation shaft it would not work because of this grid.

I guess everyone within notebook  warranty should not handle the fan somehow. Better to contact Lenovo support.

[pcunite]

To everyone having issues with the SL510 or any Thinkpad and a fan that will no longer turn off ... blow out all the dust around and inside the air intakes. I removed the plate on the bottom of my Thinkpad and blew all the dust out and it works great now.