… or Dealing with a Loud Computer Fan.I’ve been known to pop a card in and out of a desktop, or swap out a hard drive or add memory in my laptop but let’s face it, these things are pretty darn brain-dead so I don’t get a lot of points for that. So what I learned this week about some hardware is noteworthy – at least for me.The whole things starts with me eating the EMC, or rather VMWare dogfood. Over the last 6 months or so I’ve moved more and more of my environment over to VMs. My goals are slightly different than VMWare usage in most data centers; in data centers (one of) the goal is often consolidation – running multiple VMs on the same hardware – hardware that otherwise would be underutilized. My use of VMware is quite the opposite; I don’t have enough hardware to run all of the VMs that I have, though I rarely have to run more than a couple at a time. I am heavily leveraging VMs to help me with dev and test; I have one image that is my official EMC image that includes the office suite, including email, and then any number of dev images that have different technology stacks on them. I’ve got my XML REST Framework dev image and another for test, I’ve got an image for working with a bunch of latest/greatest Apache products like CXF, ServiceMix and Camel, etc. But that’s just it, my laptop doesn’t have enough horsepower to run two images at once.So under my desk I had an old machine acting as a footrest. I had replaced that machine with a more full featured desktop a bit more than a year ago – one that could handle some basic home video processing. The old one was a very basic model – absolutely no bells and whistles. But I thought maybe it would have enough horsepower to run one of my images. Over the weekend I loaded up Ubutnu 10.04 and then VMPlayer, transfered over my VM files and fired it up. At this point it all looks good, but it doesn’t sound good. Every few seconds the machine fans kick into overdrive and the resultant sound makes this a non-option. So this self-proclaimed software dude starts googling. I’ll spare you all of the details and get right to the summary.

• The fan was kicking in exactly as it should – notching up when the CPU temp was passing a certain threshold
• The CPU temp, when idle was running around 57C and was kicking up to the 61-63C range when under load. (Some digging and I found that the max temp recommendation is in the upper 70s for my processor)
• I thought briefly about trying to change the trigger points for the different levels of fan speed but found that the current configuration was pretty standard
• I took out a graphics card that I had previously put in (don’t need it to read email) and that lowered the temp by a couple of degrees

At this point it was a little better but still not where I wanted it to be. I started looking at heatsinks for a possible replacement. I had also seen a lot of recommendations about cleaning out the dust. Yeah, there was a fair bit of dust in and around the fans and the heatsink so I went down and bought a can of compressed air, blew everything out and hooked it all back up.And OMG! The idling temp went from 57C to 31C and the under load temp went to the 37-42C range!!! I was thinking “what’s a little dust?” but a little dust makes a big difference! (remember, I’m a software geek) So if your fan is kicking into overdrive all of the time, FIRST, try cleaning out the dust – that may be all you need to do.