Laptop fan rarely turns off

[Quest]

IMHO 1st and foremost: get a can of compressed air and blow all the nooks and crannies out of dustbunnies to see if that helps.

Q.

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw

Small update: For the last year or so I've been working mostly on Windows and the fan has never shut off. Today I spent some time on Linux and the silence just struck me. The fan was actually off!! So I whipped out the kill-a-watt and I checked that Linux in idle (all programs closed) consumes 18.1-18.3 watts, closing the lid reduces that by 4-4.5W. Next I rebooted into WinXP and it just won't get below 23W with the lid open.

So Windows is actually producing about 5 watts of heat more than Linux, just in idle And that's why I keep hearing the fan. I even took the laptop down to the basement and left it there for a while to see if the 5°C lower ambient temperature is enough to turn the fan off. Nope.

It looks like getting a new computer is more likely at the moment than reinstalling both OS's, so until then I'll just have to deal with the noise.

Try blowing some compressed air into the vents to remove any dust.
Check out Powertop. It's a linux app that tells you exactly what is waking your CPU up from it's idle state so you can kill these processes to save energy.