fan makes a lot of noise

Hi, I've of these barebone pcs that look like: pcideals.com/product_details.asp?PID=13758 (but of a diff spec to whats shown..) and any time i'm viewing videos from youtube, streaming video etc. the fan changes sound automatically as if i'm running a heavy program requiring high processing... and its very annoying. Also sometimes it behaves this way when say I have many tabs on my web browser open all at once. I dont see how this would require lots of processor power. Im guessing its something to do with the processor because when i open task manager CPU usage is of the process is always high. I wonder if theres anything i could do to solve this problem as well as the cause as I'm not much of a hardware person. many thanks indeed in advance


My PC spec in brief:
> P4 processor, 3GHz
>ASUS motherboard
>512MB of RAM

Ps:I thought the speed of fan increases with a change in its sound when the processor is doing lots of work...

Hi,

Actually, at work I will be troubleshooting two computers that are experiencing the same issue (fan sound is really loud when the computer starts up, when you login, when you launch programs, etc).

There is another computer at work that had a different problem--it would shut down intermittently. We went into the BIOS and noticed that there was a CPU Fan Idle Speed feature, so we increased it to the highest value and it stopped shutting down. Then we realized that the computer shouldn't have to require that the CPU be running at its fastest speed to keep the computer running, so we figured that there may be not enough thermal paste.....we popped open the case and took out the CPU, cleaned the old paste and added new one, then decreased the fan speed.......hasn't shut down yet, we'll see if it shuts down overnight.

So I'd say check the CPU thermal paste first.

K

thanks KiLLaBeE but i dont quite know how to go about doing what u suggested. I recently realised that the change in the sound of my fan was partly due to the process - vsmon.exe which is used by Zonealarm to monitor traffic. when i shutdown zone alarm / kill the process, the sound becomes normal and im running the most up to date version of ZoneAlarm pro. any suggestions on what to do because i dont want to make my machine vulnerable by shutting down my firewall? any responses appreciated. thanks

What may be happening is, your CPU fan is auto-sensing that the CPU is getting hotter cuz the vsmon process is making the CPU work harder, and so the fan speeds up to cool the CPU.

If you want to stick with ZA, try the following: Press Alt+Ctrl+Del, Click the Processes tab, right-click the vsmon process, choose Set Priority, and choose Low.

What you'll be doing is telling windows to give the service low priority, meaning that the CPU will service it less often than it will service the other processes, and so it may not get hotter.

Other option is to add thermal paste.....it fixed 1 PC at work, the other one I'm waiting to see.

Let us know the outcome

K

got a question...

my sidepanel fan does the same, sometimes its quiet, but then all of a sudden it goes bezerk, louder and softer, like it has a mind of its own. I caught it the other day running at an unusually slow speed, and i checked my monitor on frontpanel to see if anyone changed the fanspeeds, but it was all set to max... when i give the sidepanel fan a slight tap it goes quiet, but not for long... so i have tapped it quite a few times, after a long time of fustration and irritations, i decided to plug that fan out...

all was good for a while (actually quite a long time) and now recently my other sidepanel fan, (next to the motherboard are starting to make those noises, not as loud as the other sidepanel-fan...

oh and before i forget, dust and other kind of stuff that accumalates on the fan bracket or what ever could be causing the fan to carry extra weight and that can also cause this noise....

i clean my fans with a brush very often...

many thanks guys...i'll try them all out..