Laptop Fan Control Utilities

Question

Fan control for the XPS 13 laptop has recently become a big issue. Dell laptops have always had rather poor fan control profiles embedded in the BIOS. Older laptops could usually be fixed using SpeedFan and, especially, i8kfangui. At some point, Dell changed how their fan control worked, and the add-on utilities did not work very well. I had a little extra time today to dig a little deeper into control utilities. There has been a lot of work by Linux users on Dell laptops because of even poorer control with Linux. I was able to find a lot of hits for modified i8kfangui programs for Linux and some with Windows. Programs are: i8kutils i8kctl i8kmod One hit had a download for i8kutils for all Windows versions:  donsohamn.se/community1/i8kutils-download.html I do not have a laptop with me for the next 10 weeks, so cannot evaluate any of these possibilities. Based on the number of hits, there has been a lot of work done in the last two or three years.

CurbedLarry · Answer

Have found the developer of that utility has posted on here so have asked about Windows support:

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19579258

Also found the developer of SpeedFan is aware of issues controlling recent Dell machines under Windows, but clearly not a priority for them:

http://www.bugtrack.almico.com/view.php?id=1869

Considering Dell sell high-end gaming laptops it's strange that fan control is totally locked-down and/or broken. An extremely stubborn approach to power users in this day and age.

Locked Topics – Laptops General

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