Noisy fan all of a sudden

stacexD

I have an Acer Aspire 5736z that i got in november. It has (had) one of the quitest fans ive ever geard. It comes on for a few seconds every 3 or 4 mins and goes off again. Today i noticed that it suddenly got VERY loud. Its still only coming on for a few seconds though and the latop is as cool and fast as ever?

xsiborg

honestly, worst case scenario is it sounds like the fan bearings could be gone, if its actually THAT noisy, i had it happen with a sony vaio that was only a few months old too, got it fixed under warranty, the same may apply to your acer, bring it back to the place you purchased it.

now, thats worst case scenario. the more hopeful option is that its just got a clog of dust in the fan. usually there's a grill where the fan is and you can buy a can of compressed air in any pc shop or hardware store and blow out the vents yourself.

hope this helps.

EDIT: that cooling method where the fan goes into "overdrive" periodically is perfectly normal. depending on your power plan it sounds like you use the laptop on the "high performance plan", you'll notice if you use the laptop on "balanced" or i think on acers its called "eco mode", the fan wont spin up quite as loudly...

Kinetic^

Dust clogging it up or bearings are gone. Should be covered under warranty.

stacexD

Yeah I was gonna get a can of compressed air today and have a go at it.. couldnt see it anywhere though. Would it be a bad move having a go at it with the hoover?

Kinetic^

It probably wouldn't be the smartest thing tbh.

xsiborg

well, i know there's the expression "suck like a dyson", but even that wouldn't have suction powerful enough to effectively pull the dust off the fan through the grille.

even if you stuck the suction pipe to the grille without the head attached the dust would still cling to the fan flaps due to the build up of static electricity...

EDIT:

just did a quick google there as i remembered certain HP laptop models about two years ago had problems with fan speeds/temps, and a BIOS update solved the issue.

from http://acer.ilaptopsale.com/acer-aspire-5736z-laptop/

robot557 says:
February 1, 2011 at 11:37 pm

@Burgattti might be a little late, but i’ll post this anyways. just got this laptop today and had the same problem as you. the fan was completely insane. updated the bios from version 1.00 to 1.04 and that completely fixed the problem!!

now honestly, i'd check the settings in power management first because i know that on some laptops, depending on your power management profile, you can set the fan to spin all the time but quietly, or just kick in every so often, which sounds like what your's is at. i'd check all these first before i'd do a BIOS update, they're no fun at all, and could very easily leave you with a very expensive paperweight!

if you do decide on a BIOS update, first check what BIOS version you have, then compare it to this one (top of the list)

http://support.acer.com/us/en/product/default.aspx?modelId=3322

stacexD

The fam always came on in bursts but it was always quiet until now. My laptop is always on balanced or power saver mode. Sure I'll have another look out for one of those air cans in town tomorrow! It's still under warranty anyway just with PC world when you bring it back it always feckin comes back from repair on day 30 (just quick enough for them not to have to replace it)

xsiborg

let us know how you get on anyway...

stacexD

Well funny enough I was using my laptop earlier... then picked it up an hour ago and the fans gone back to normal.. weird! Hope it stays this way

stacexD

Well... sorry to annoy ye again but... restarted today for automatic updates and as soon as it restarted the fan went noisy again

kippy

Hi OP,
You may be having a physical problem with your fan (just to add to above are all vents ublocked when in use/its not resting on cloth?)however it is more likely that the issue is happening naturally. IE, your fan is running fast/often because the processor is getting hotter than normal due to more utilisation than normal.
I've had this problem only last week on a win 7 32 bit machine that was okay up until last week. For some reason the fan just kept on, because the process was under pressure.
The last post here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/5032-63-taskhost-running about stopping the windows reliability analysis scheduled task resolved the issue.
When I get a bit of time I'll do a bit more troubleshooting and also try figure out why there are so many scheduled tasks in win 7!

Hope you get to the bottom of it.

stacexD

My CPU is running at around 10% all day thats what i dont understand! Wish I knew a bit more about computers

kippy

I think you said you got it in November, have your tried checking for the warranty on it and getting something done under that?