We have several Dell laptops: my main XPS 15 where I do... well everything..., and a Latitude which is more compact for travel to Uni etc (which I got from the Dell Outlet store - a story for another time).
Now, sometimes the fans are spinning even when the laptop isn't actually doing anything. The fan control on these units seem to play up sometimes, and the way to fix it is to switch or even just toggle between the Thermal Management profiles.
Unfortunately there is a bit of inconvenience in doing so...
The problem: It takes ~30 seconds to get to the screen where you can change the Thermal Setting
The 'Dell Power Manager' splash screen alone takes 20 seconds (oh why!!?). Then add a few more seconds for the time it takes to launch it from Start Menu, and clicking on the Thermal Management tab once the app loads.
The solution: A dead simple, instant access tray app that replaces 'Dell Power Manager' UI app altogether
I feel like if I cleaned up the code a bit and made this releasable, this little app would really take off on reddit!
But for now you can build it for yourself from here (.NET 5) - https://github.com/navhaxs/DellFanManagement
- There is a tray app to switch between thermal profiles. It also indicates which is the active thermal profile.
- There is a Windows Service which does nothing but wait for the tray app to send a command or fetch the current thermal profile state. This runs with administrator privilleges (so that the tray app doesn't and can load on start up without any trouble - pretty cool, ay?)
Credits
Full credit and kudos to Aaron Kelley for writing the library which interfaces with Dell's power management driver. Great work! - https://github.com/AaronKelley/DellFanManagement