Reducing Fan Noise on my Tecra M4

Since a month or so I’m using a Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc as my main laptop (replacing my ‘old’ HP NX9110). At first sight I was quite pleased with the machine: nice big screen with a high resolution, good CPU power and not too heavy. Since this is my first tablet, this ‘coolness’ factor is of course also playing a role! Later on I got to know the not-so-nice features of this machine: battery life is not that great (2h) and sometimes it seems that the machine is going to take off. When the CPU usage bumps (even very short) the fan reacts immediately causing some very loud noise. When you’re in a VPC the noise is almost always there.

After reading some forum posts of people who had the same issues, I discovered a post that mentioned a tool that can lower the voltage of modern CPU’s: RightMark Clock Utility. Apparently many CPU’s can run with a lower voltage than set by default which of course lowers the produced heat and power consumption. Probably this tool is fantastic if you get the hang of it, but I spent an hour or so playing with the (many) settings and I didn’t get any result (probably due to my lack of knowledge in this area). When I was looking for some tutorials I discovered another tool that can do the same thing: Notebook Hardware Control. I installed this tool and I got it working in a couple of minutes, I decreased the CPU voltage a couple of levels, without decreasing the CPU clock frequency or the CPU's performance! The UI is more basic than the other tool (less settings) so even I could configure it. The result: the decrease of the produced noise of the Tecra M4 is quite dramatic, I haven’t heard the fan running on the highest speed ever since. The heat produced is a lot less (going from 80 to 90 degrees Celcius to 40 to 50) and the battery life has increased by 20 to 30 minutes. Thank you very much Notebook Hardware Control! There’s a free version and a commercial license (which allows the tool to run as a service) and it’s written in .NET 2.0, can I get any better?

Some of my colleagues at U2U also tried it on their tablets and now they owe me a beer (or two). Peter tried it on Vista Beta 2 running on a Tecra M4, and it works great on Vista as well. So for all of you who want to cool down and silence their laptops: give it a try.

8 Comments

  • Cool, thanks for posting that. The heat/noise of the M4 is annoying ... I'm going to try this out.

  • Another thing you could try is remove the dust built up inside the machine. Dust traps the hot air close to the cooling surfaces, making them far less efficient. If you do not want to open up the machine, just put a vacuum cleaner close to the ventilation holes and let it rip. Worked well on my noisy Dell Inspiron 9100.

  • Tell me more about performance. It seems to me that if you lower the voltage and don't increase the amperage to compensate (thus increasing heat) yoku MUST sacrifice performance.

    Does the software have a performance meter of some kind or are you offering subjective information?

    I have a client who is looking for a Tecra M4. He lives and works in a hot climate on cunstruction sites so this is realy significant information.

    Thanks :)

  • voudrais repondre a monsieur dubier routier sinclair s'il peut m'ecrire
    benissadf@yahoo.fdr

  • voudrais repondre a monsieur dubier routier sinclair s'il peut m'ecrire
    benissadf@yahoo.fr

  • NHC doesn't work on Vista. As soon as I run the EXE it blue screens. Can you re-distribute the EXE compiled on a Vista machine ?

  • # re: Reducing Fan Noise on my Tecra M4
    Wednesday, March 28, 2007 2:31 PM by Pranav
    NHC doesn't work on Vista. As soon as I run the EXE it blue screens. Can you re-distribute the EXE compiled on a Vista machine ?

    >>>>>>> NO RESPONSE YET <<<<<<<<<<<

    My fan noise is worse on Vista.

  • Removing dust on heat sink solved the fan issue. NHC 5-stars

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