Latitude D630 fan running

Dust Bunny infestation in the heatsink/fan area can cause this.

Pet Hair is even worse.

I have blown it out with a compressor and it is clean, clean.

I would guess its most likely clogged up with a thick layer of dust in the fan/behind the heatsink.

If you are up to dismanting (dell do have good service manuals online)  you can take the fan /heatsink out (although it requires removing the motherboard) and clean out the thick layer of dust that may be present.

Failing that, it could be the fan is on the way out, replacement fans are pretty cheap second hand.

Check also the heatsink is not coming loose.

I have taken off the keyboard and looked at the fan area and heatsink and there is not a spec of dust in this area and under the keyboard. I did get my can of air and stuck it in every nook and cranny in the heatsink area and gave it a blast. Not dust. Note that the fan only comes on loud when you restart or first turn on the computer then it shuts up after 10 minutes or so. So is this weird or what? What could be causing this? Everything is tight in there and looks good.

Nobody can figure out this one can they? The computer can work all day without this loud fan noise, all day. As soon as I restart at anytime or when 1st turned on the fan runs for maybe 10 minutes but more like 5 minutes. When it shuts off then it stays off. If the fan is running at this time then it is very quiet. It only gets loud when restarted and 1st turn on. It does not make a berring noise just a blowing noise some some older Toshiba's do. So it does not sound like the fan has a problem just that the computer runs it on startup or restart.

It is absolutely clean inside. What can this be?

This is a Dell D630 with a 2.6ghz, 3 gb of ram and XP Pro. I guess I spelled bearing wrong.

When I first got the computer the heat sink vanes in the back had a dent in three vanes but I straighten them up with a tiny screwdriver so the air is clearing these vanes perfectly. I have opened up the keyboard and heatsink area and blew out all dust. It seem to be clean in this whole general area.

I have three other D630s and the fans run pretty quietly while on, you can hear them spinning. Of course the one above does as well after the initial loud blowing. It kinda reminds me of a smart fan where it will spin up at times.  There has to be an answer. I can't be the only one that has this issue.

Any ideas?

Check heatsink is seated properly, and tightly fitted, check all thermal pads are in place and clean, perhaps put some decent thermal paste on the CPU. Check you have the same BIOS on all three (as different BIOS's have different cooling profiles). Check you have no third party fan software installed in the background anywhere.

Is it NVIDIA or Intel btw?

If Nvidia it could be starting to fail, leading to a heat build up perhaps?

Or the fan could just be a noisy fan, perhaps a drop of lube in it may help.

It only happens on startup or restart then it can be on all day and be a quiet fan is what is so strange. Like yesterday it was left on all day and the fan was mildly quiet. If I had restarted it at the end of the day the fan would cycle loudly for 5 minutes again.

I have a D630 whose motherboard failed - just replaced it with a new one. Now I get a high to low cycling (1s up 1s down) for the first couple minutes at restart with the new system board that was never there on the old board.

Heatsink fins cleaned (certainly cleaner than with old board when it didn't happen).

doesnt' seem to correspond to any CPU utilization either...

I have bought and sold over 60 D630s and this is the only one that does that. Even when it has been on all night with no fan running and if I restart it then it will recycle the fan on for about a minute. Strange and no one knows the cause.

I just got a D630c that is doing the fan on-off-on-off problem too.  I suspect that it happened AFTER I upgraded the Nvidia 135M drivers to the most current one's.  It does turn off after about 5 mins from restart but it is really annoying.  I am tempted to change the drivers back to older one's or remove them entirely and see if that fixes the problem.  I have monitored the temp of the CPU and GPU and they are not even getting above 45C so that is not the reason.  I have a different d630 that will push 70C before kicking on these settings.  This motherboard is an older one I believe and that may have something to do with it.  I know they did send out replacement motherboards when the originals died.  I changed my orignal one and the chipsets may be different on these newer on's than the older ones.  So if anyone else has any suggestions to stop the fan from going uyp-down-up-down, I would be all ears. :)

Thanks!

My wife's computer does exactly the same thing. Yea, it is about 3 or 4 minutes then is quiet. On a restart when the computer was on all day it will cycle on again. So something seems to be built into a driver or bios that cycles that noisy fan on for that short time. Help, let's fix it.:emotion-15:

Yep.. I removed the Nvidia drivers and just went with the standard XP VGA drivers, and the fan issue is solved.  However now the graphics basically suck.  It must be a nVidia driver setting they put in there because otherwise that wouldn't happen.  I guess we'll have to email nvidia to get this problem solved and not dell.  Not sure if I will really get much of a response from them tho.  Too bad I don't program or I might be able to fix this myself, but I don't know crap about programming so put of luck there..

New Data Point!?

I had started with the cyclic fan issue after replacing my D630 system board with a D630c compatible board.  The hard drive still had the nVidia drivers I got from Dell for the D630. Today at work I found a "Dell Drivers & Utilities" (P/N YX158 Rev A02 Feb 2008).  From it I let it run the utility, and then installed the newer nVidia driver (and maybe one specific or properly configured to support the D630c?). Admittedly, I installed several drivers that it suggested... but once the reboot completed - VOILA! no more cycling!

FWIW, I now have: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M - 4/28/2007 ver 6.14.11.119

The Dell zipped installer file extracted for this driver was R157636