How Hot Thou Art

For two years now my everyday companion (besides my "better half") has been a Dell Inspiron 8200. I've put a lot of miles on this laptop. And I mean A LOT. That includes some hardcore gaming: Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942, Need for Speed Underground, Unreal Tournament 2004 (I'm a fanatic UT gamer), Call of Duty, and so on. Just recently it gave me a scare a few times when one of the fans in the back would go off like insane with the other one remaining still. When it happens, video becomes choppy, and the system slows down overall. Letting the laptop "cool off" helps.

Trying to get to the bottom of this problem I visited Dell Support forums and found that some people had a similar problem. One fellow pointed out a diagnostics tool for Inpirons and Latitudes: Dell Inspiron 8x00 fan control utility. Now, don't be fooled by the crappy looks of their web site! The utility is a godsend. It appears to work for a lot of Inspiron and Latitude models.

This utility allows you to monitor the temperatures of CPU, HDD, graphics processor, DIMM (if supported by your model), CPU load, and displays these stats real-time. You can also see them in the system tray.

The tool also lets you control fan status by turning them on or off by hand, as well as picking a profile (Normal, Meeting, Office, Games) and letting the tool drive. Based on the profile and CPU temperature it spins the fans slow, fast or stops them.

For those of you who feel geeky enough there's source code. ;)