Fans not turning off

Hi Violet, This happens to me too (8890V). Since I am a weather enthusiast, I have thermometers around the house. In my situation, when the house temp hit 80, the fans stay on constantly. Using Mobile Monitor I see that the computer temps stays 1-2 degrees above the point where the fans should shut off. If I play a game, the temps go up as normal, and come down as normal but stay just a degree or 2 above shut off (this with a system that has no dust in the vents and has been nicely air compressed). If I turn on the house AC and get the house temps down to 79-78 the computer finally reaches the fan shut off point. What are your ambient house/office temps?

To get to the heat sink, remove the panel directly below the vent on the right side of the computer. With the computer bottom facing up (with the front cd panel to you,) unscrewing the 3 screws to the left of the 2 fan vents (the panel will come off with one rubber foot attached). Blow it out with compressed air both ways (fans to vent, vent to fans) to dislodge all the dust. I always put an obstruction into the fan blades like a soft Q-Tip stalk to keep them from over spinning (or in my case from spinning at all) when using compressed air. Your situation sounds normal to me, but then again I don’t know your ambient air temps so if you are in an office at 70 degrees, disregard my babble and blow out them vents . Take Care, Andy

Yeah, even it its new, you can easily pick up a bunch of dust bunny makings, that stuff can be almost invisible. Could be a hair got sucked in and that starts catching other lint which then catches more and more and pretty soon, you got a bunny. It just takes shaking out a blanket, towel or rug nearby, whooph, you got a bunny farm.

Get in there and clean that bugger out.

At least I hope thats the problem. Let us know what happens.

I'd avoid compressed air.

As I have always said in the past, avoid compressed air.
Atleast ARW mentioned the q-tip to prevent spinning the fan.
I don't think it's necessary for me to continue typing.
I've given many good posts about this topic.

Using compressed air won't blow all the dust out of the machine. Where the dust gathers, it clumps up and creates like a mesh - like you'd get from your clothes dryer. Using air breaks up the mesh sending little dust particles flying everywhere which can get into other parts of the machine. You're definitely best off just removing the heat sink and peeling it off. Just my two cents.

Eventually all the dust will gather...

I think I've explained this well enough before, so I won't go into too much detail. Eventually all the dust will gather and reach a bottleneck point, in this case the opening of the heatsink. As pyrobob said, you're just blowing the dust everywhere, and rebreaking it back down into little particles again. Why not just open the sager and peel it off so you don't get dust everywhere? Blowing air is simply hoping that you're getting it clean.

Here, do you know much math? Think of it as a calculus situation where you're trying to measure the effeciency of the blowing method to that of the peeling method. The peeling method yeilds a constant result of "very clean" each time. The blowing method on the other hand, depends on the rate of change of the quality of the internal air to that of the rate of change of time. It's basically a time derivative. The longer you blow air through the notebook, the cleaner it will get (you're adding pure air to a solution of dust/air mix). As you can imagine, it gets a lot of dust out at first, but then as less dust is left into the system, this method looses its effeciency as you as basically performing a fluid dilution (with the pure air acting as the solvent). Now, like all things, there is a terminal rate of change that this will reach (when the particles are so spread out that they will no longer come out) and this is when you really screwed things up. They will collect in areas that don't normally get dust runing through them, and you'll never get them clean.

All of this could have been prevented with a simple unscrewing of 3 screws, and 4 spring-loaded screws. Plus you don't have to purchase a can of air and you also don't have to breathe in the dust. If you really care about your expensive investment (Sager's are expensive) then shouldn't you treat it with the utmost care? I do.

Oh, and to answer the question about why spinning the fans is bad. By spinning the ball bearing fans when they are not running, you run the risk of blowing one of them out (or causing damage to where they will experiance increased resistance). I always thought that this was common knowledge. People used to take their videocards out of their desktops all the time, and blow air though the fans. Eventually their fans would make buzzing sounds during operation, and seize up. Like I said, treat your sager with the love and care that it deserves.

Denny Metcalf
dennymet@bu.edu

Crazy students!

Just restating it in a more universal lingo...

Yeah, we are crazy to subject ourselves to the torture and scrutiny of college life. Where else would someone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to inflict insurmountable levels of self torment, work two jobs with overtime, and only sleep 5 hours a night.

I know the feeling man. I'm a student too, but taking a year off working. Next year I go back and have only have one more year to go. Masters? Yeah right!