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Fix Loud Fan Win10 Dell Notebook

agowa338 agowa338 Oct 13, 2023 · 2 mins read
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My Dell notebook was making very loud fan noises as soon as it was connected to the dock. I already suspected the windows powerplan settings from the start, but MS decided to clear the menu that formerly had all the "advanced power plan options", as well as delete all power plans except for "Balanced". So I looked at other ways to fix this issue, but with no real success. So after a while of wasted efforts I decided to look if just reenabling that menu is possible. And it turned out that it is.

#ps1
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power' -Name 'CsEnabled' -Value 0

# Iterates through all the subkeys of 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings'
# that have a uuid as name and creates/sets an attribute named 'Attributes' with the Value '2'
# in there, to unhide this setting.
Invoke-Gsudo {
  function aa($b) {
    Get-Item -Path $b | Get-ChildItem | ForEach-Object {
      $a = $_
      if ($a.PSChildName -as [guid]) {
        $null = Set-ItemProperty -Path $a.PSPath -Name 'Attributes' -Value 2
        aa -b $a.PSPath
      }
    } | Select-Object -ExpandProperty PSPath
  }
  aa 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings'
}

After that we've to close all control pannel and power plan windows that we may still have open (otherwise the change won't show up until you do). Now open the "classic" control pannel again and navigate to:
"power & sleep" -> "Additional power settings" -> "Change plan settings" -> "change advanced power settings"

The first thing to change is the cooling policy, navigate to:
"Processor power management" -> "System cooling policy" -> "Plugged in"
and change it to:
"Passive"

I however just went through everything and changed the "Plugged in" one to match the "Battery" ones. Now my notebook is behaving the same way docked and not docked. And most importantly this Dell notebook with the unbalanced i7 that heats up so fast won't annoy me with constant 100% fan noises anymore.

agowa338
Written by agowa338