My laptop fan hasn't spun up in 3 months because of a hidden power plan setting

I was getting so annoyed at how loud my laptop fan was, even just browsing Chrome. I opened task manager, nothing was using CPU. Then I accidentally opened power options and clicked "change plan settings" then "change advanced power settings." There's a whole dropdown called "processor power management" and I just set the max state to 99% instead of 100%. Fan is dead silent now, and I honestly can't tell the difference in speed. Has anyone else tried this? I feel like nobody talks about that one little slider.

2 comments

2 Comments

john43018d ago

That's a really smart find. I've been dealing with a noisy laptop for years and never thought to look under processor power management. Something about having the max state just a hair below 100% feels like it shouldn't make that big a difference, but it clearly does for the fan noise. I think a lot of people just assume laptops have to sound like a jet engine when doing anything. It's good to know there's a simple fix that doesn't sacrifice much performance. I'm going to try this on my machine tonight.

bethcarr17d ago

And actually, it doesn't have to be all the way down to 99% either. I've found that even setting it to 99.5% or just a tiny bit below the maximum can have the same effect on fan noise, at least on my machine. The reason seems to be that as soon as you drop that "100%" mark, the processor stops boosting to its absolute highest turbo speed, which is where all the heat and fan noise come from. So you're really just giving up that last tiny burst of performance that you can barely feel anyway, but the quiet is immediate. It's one of those rare fixes that actually works better than you expect.