6 ms·
I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in
by jml7c5 2y ago
I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI.
People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine.
Laptop manufacturers want their devices to score high on benchmarks. The best way to do that is to add a fan that can become very loud.
The incentives are not aligned.
All laptops should be designed to operate passively 100% of the time, if the owner so chooses. I doubt manufacturers will go that route unless Microsoft nudges them towards it. It would have downstream effects on how review sites benchmark laptops (i.e., at various power draws/noise levels producing a curve rather than a single number), which would have downstream effects on what CPU designers optimize for. It'd be great for consumers.
- latchkey 2y agoI don't know anything about Windows, but at least on Mac, I've been using TGPro for years [0]. I'd assume there is something similar in the Windows world. In normal conditions my M1 mac can control its fans just fine, but when I travel to hot places like Vietnam... I just keep the fans on more often and my machine doesn't get nearly as hot. I end up having to open it up after a few months and clean out the fans, but that's fine. [0] https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/ https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoStop demanding paper thin laptops. My work Dell rarely turns on its fan unless an AV scan is in progress and even then it's rather tolerable. It isn't a fashionable thickness so has plenty of internal volume for heat distribution.
- rafaelmn 2y agoMacBook Air is thin and fanless, so it can be done.
- cmeacham98 2y agoThe cheapest MacBook Air is $1000, and it's more like $1500+ if you want a reasonable amount of RAM and storage. There are similarly expensive Windows laptops available that are fanless.
- rafaelmn 2y agoMind linking some (genuinely curious, would like to checkout potential Linux machine for the next upgrade)
- nov21b 2y agoCount me in
- jacooper 2y agoSurface laptop.
- tedunangst 2y agoNot even the arm version of surface laptop is fanless.
- esperent 2y agoThe Huawei Mate book X. I think there's a fanless Asus ZenBook too, or the Surface Pro X. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawei-MateBook-X-in-review-Ultra-thin-extremely-light-and-absolutely-silent.540313.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawei-MateBook-X-in-review-Ul...
- aurareturn 2y ago>There are similarly expensive Windows laptops available that are fanless. Such as?
- phonon 2y agoWait until Lunar Lake comes out.
- tuna74 2y agoI want a thin and fanless laptop. You might want something else.
- amy-petrik-214 2y agoI want a very thick laptop with many fans. It should be chonky and with personality like an old sun tadpole unix labtop, not svlete and artsy liek a 2000s macbook. I like the white noise and if it helps preformance all the better.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> Stop demanding paper thin laptops Then use a desktop. Like most people I want my laptop paper thin: at least Apple understands that correctly. My daily laptop driver is a "LG Gram" which is especially slick, thin and light (lighter than any Mac laptop) and it's no slouch: 24 GB of RAM for example. And it's basically quiet: I don't even know if it has any fan (I own it since years and never heard a fan). I'll take a slightly slower laptop if it means it's much quieter. But there's no way I'm going back to the bricks we used to have in 90s/2000s. If you need a 4090 GPU, buy a desktop and call it a day. For everything else, you can get plenty of power, fast NVMe M.2 SSD, lots of RAM in a paper thin laptop.
- shmerl 2y agoYou can use Linux and hwmon.
- mqus 2y ago> add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. Isn't that what the "power settings" do? It's a slider at the bottom right, hidden in a tray icon. Sure, it only has three positions and also influences battery consumption but it pretty much does what you want. (Not sure if windows 11 kept this though)
- nightski 2y agoI don't mind fans at all, in fact I find fan noises a little soothing (a childhood thing, we didn't have AC). Everyone has different priorities, personally I'd prefer to not have throttled performance.
- sandreas 2y agoDid you know NBFC (Notebook Fan Control)? It's old, but still works on some devices and you can create custom profiles via XML. https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc
- jwells89 2y agoIt might also be good to mandate 10+ hours of battery life when the laptop is in power saving mode. A number of laptops that'd otherwise have decent battery life are hampered by things like half-baked power management of discrete GPUs that doesn't completely cut power supply to those components. Manufacturers should be more heavily testing under this mode.
- devbent 2y agoA few misbehaving CSS filters can make my discreet GPU turn on and at that point my battery life is a goner. Not sure who to blame in that scenario. There was an old bug in FF around 2018 where a tab using a GPU would prevent a Windows laptop from ever sleeping. That ended up destroying that laptop's battery after it got thrown in my backpack and overheated a couple times.
- jwells89 2y agoSeems like this could be fixed by a system setting that disables automatic graphic switching which can be controlled by power profiles. That way the user can set the machine to use iGPU only when on battery, regardless of what programs want.
- automatic6131 2y ago>I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI Until then, there's https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases
- mkhalil 2y agoA closed source application for controlling one's fan...umm no thank you. I never will understand the reasoning behind why people are so afraid of releasing their source code. Looks like a weekend project; does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project?
- Rinzler89 2y ago>Looks like a weekend project; Is that the best developer insult in your repertoire? >does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project? Trying to make money from writing SW is not illegal. The free market will decide. >A closed source application for controlling one's fan...umm no thank you. Well since you think it's only a weekend project, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and spend a weekend developing a FOSS fan control app if you need one?
- wiseowise 2y ago> Looks like a weekend project; does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project? Why won’t you spend a weekend and do the world a service?
- delfinom 2y agoIn this case, every OEM will just copy it and slap their name on it. He released it as freeware and he has every right to do so. You have no right to others work.
- Dwedit 2y agoIt's a .NET program without any obfuscation. You can read the source code using any .NET decompiler, such as ILSPY.
- cpv 2y agoSome recent asus ROG/TUF 2022+ models have fine tuning available via "armoury crate" or "g-helper" (non-proprietary, fan/community supported, code on github). Disabling a dGpu and reducing power can yeld some impressive results for battery life. Allows also defining fan speed curves depending on temperature.
- akvadrako 2y agoThis exists. My friend's new ASUS ROG G16 let's you control maximum power draw for the CPU / GPU and draw the fan curve (temp → RPM). The only thing that seems missing is a (temperature → max power curve) to handle spikes.