Dell Vostro 3700 Fan going ON and OFF - drives me crazy.

no offence mate, but I know what Ive spent one grand on.

its vostro 3700.

Are you sure you ain't got a Studio 1749 by mistake ....  have a look at the postings for this model - Dell seem to have a universal problem.

anyone?

can anyone please acknowledge this?

am i the only one  with this problem?

Hi,

I am experiencing exactly the same thing.

Its not constant, only when the fan has to kick in to high speed.

Have you managed to find a solution to this yet?

Hi!

Finally some answer...

And no, I didnt found a solution, because apparently, there is none.

Ive called dell tech support and they saw my video and said that it is the nominal fan work mode, designed by the engineers.

Its normal for the fan to work that way and theres no way around it since they dont do anything to change it.

I even changed BIOS to a version that fixes fan issues in Dell Studio laptop line, but it didnt help either.

I also have a Vostro 3700 (Win 7 x64).

Pretty nice model, except the fan noise. I normally work in very silent rooms, so even moderate fan noise can be annoying. But this fan noise is even more annoying as it starts and ends over and over again. The funny thing is, the system isn't even notable hot when it starts cooling like it's burning right away.

Whatever, in most cases this is not a hardware problem but a software problem. So I made my way through the internet looking for workarounds and software patches.

Today, my fan is pretty much quiet. It sometimes turns on and goes up like that once or twice and keeps being quiet for a while. In overall, the current fan behaviour and noise is acceptable compared to many other notebooks. It's not final, but it might work for other Vostro 3700 users who experience the same problem and can't get any other help at this time:

First of all, a tool to control the fan speed would be godlike. Unfortunately, at least on my Win 7 x64 edition, there's no tool that works on this machine yet (Speedfan, i8kfanGUI, not supported). BIOS does not help at this point either. So, fan control can be skipped until there'll be a solution someday.

You should update almost everything Dell offers for your product (your service tag number gives you a list of updates for exactly your model). It's a good idea to update your drivers anyways as this step may raise your performance. In the end, you should be on the latest BIOS for your model (currently A05), up to date with your graphics, HDD and CPU. Maybe update your Windows as well, who cares at this point.

Now, you can only wait for new updates. Until that, deactivate everything you don't need. I disabled the bluetooth device and many other processes running on startup, which are marked as optional by TuneUp Utilities. If you have FF Protection, deactivate this as well (although it sounds very suspicous to disable your HDD protection, whatever).

In the end, your system should only start the really needed processes for your notebook on startup (this state is a general goal in any case).

Being up to date with everything possible and starting only the really needed processes on startup reduced my fan noise, at least the frequency of it appearing (and seriously the performance of my notebook). Whatever, this is not final and I hope for more Dell support in this case. A working fan control would do the job already.

Finally, seeing Vostro 3700 being marked as a business solution, this fan noise isn't acceptable and I expect Dell to handle this problem. I would have already send it back to Dell, but during my internet researches, I realized that other Dell notebooks do have equal problems (or even worse). For me, the only solution is to keep this notebook and solve this problem by my own until Dell solves it or simply get something different from a different supplier.

I received my Vostro 3700 last week and had the exact same problem. I searched here to find a solution and saw that others had the same problem. I contacted dell and they sent an engineer to day to replace the motherboard and the fan and it seems to be fixed.

Hey,

Thanks for the info.

I have also restored my comp back almost to the factory settings.

Re-installed my main programs and also the 2010 tune-up utilities.

This sorted a lot of my registry issues which seems to have helped a lot.

This fan thing still comes on but only for a short time then returns to a more normal intermediate speed which is surprisingly soft.

I must say though after spending an hour on the phone with Dell on monday, they phoned me yesterday to find out if the comp is still having the prob.

Big thumbs up to dell in that regard. i will see if they can give me more information today.

Well I certainly hope that i wont need to replace the motherboard and stuff .

So far i have heard my fan going through 2 stages, lower or normal operating speed and then a higher speed which lasted about 5 mins while doing a Virus scan and updates etc all at once.

But Alas, as i am typing this the fan has just started doing the 3 Sec cycle.

It therefore seems as if there's 3 stages for this fan, normal, intermediate and 3 second stage.

However, this on off cycle only lasted about 2 mins, which is something that i could live with actually.

Will see how it goes.

Is your laptop not in the 1 year warranty? At least it would mean not hearing the annoying noise.

Is anyone elses space key a bit hard to press?

My space key reacts good.

I wonder if anyone can confirm that an update to the latest BIOS, A07, reduced the problem to a minimum. At least it seems so to me.

I am also experiencing this very annoying issue.

There haven't been any posts on this thread lately. In the meantime the BIOS version got to A10, but even that doesn't seem to solve the problem in any way.

The strange thing is that the strange fan behavior only seems to happen on a certain temperature. If during the "on and off" cycle I start an operation that consumes a lot of GPU or CPU power (like compressing a big folder) the fan switches to working in a continuous running mode which is much more silent. It seems like the fan logic has a very stupid rule like when temperature T is reached and fan not running start it, when temp T reached and fun running stop it. This for a certain CPU / GPU load would just continuously make the fan run on and off. The rule should have been start the fan at T + x and stop the fan at T - x. Very strange that they cannot fix the behavior with BIOS updates.

Anyway, searching for workarounds I went into this thread http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19331269/19731141.aspx , which had a much more intense activity and a similar problem. From there it seems that some people managed to solve fan problems by using the video card in hybrid mode (that is using the integrated intel video card for low consumption and switch to the more powerful discrete nVidia card only when needed). However I was not able to setup my PC to work in hybrid mode.

I have a Dell Vostro 3700 with an i5-560M processor (which according to Intel's site has integrated video capabilities) and a nVidia GeForce GT330M video card. I am using Windows 7 64bit. I tried to install the hybrid version of the nVidia drivers (which I am getting from the Dell site) but I cannot do that. During the installation process, I am only given the option to install the nVidia sound card. When using the driver version for discrete nVidia video cards, the install process goes without any problem. I am using the latest BIOS version (A10).

From the documentation ( http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/Vos3700/en/SM/Bios.htm#System_Setup_Options ) , it seems that in BIOS there should be an option for "Hybrid Graphic" which would allow to enable / disable that feature. However, my BIOS doesn't show that option. Rumors are that older BIOS versions (A08) do have that option available, but couldn't find any confirmation (or infirmation) on that.

Do any of you guys have that option available in BIOS?

I am not sure at this point, since I couldn't find anything relevant in a short research, but it seems that hybrid graphics might be only made available in certain hardware configurations, simply having a an integrated and discrete video card doesn't  make it available by default. Does anybody have more info on this?

I have read all posts but have noot found any mentions regarding strange sound, like a whiz, tha Vostro 3700 is making.

i have not problems with Fan going ON and OFF, ectualy my fan is not going ON and OFF so often, yet, as you all are describing, but i have some sound like whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, and this realy drives me crazy!

maybe anyone can offer me solution for my problem.

there are many users of vostro with the same problem but at given formum theer are 2 more users only

(http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19353415/19798598.aspx#19798598)

hope anyone of you can help me or Dell will help me!!!!!!!!!!!