My laptop fan refusing to stop running loud

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Ubuntu Support Template

Ubuntu Version:
25.10

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
Gnome

Problem Description:
When I first started with Ubuntu, my laptop was whisper quiet ALWAYS! Now, if I open loads of tabs on Edge and Brave browsers (the only ones I use), then the laptop fan goes wild! It doesn’t stop running.

I close the browsers completely - no joy. I kill the browsers. Still the same.

ChatGPT has given me loads of things to try - but nothing stops it! The fans just keep going. I’ve checked for processes running - nothing hogging resources after stopping all browsers (and closing other open apps).

I’ve been going round preaching Ubuntu to everyone I come across and telling them how silent my laptop always is. But now it’s bad as Windows.

OK… so I don’t have the latest laptop with loads of resources - see below. BUT… the fan problem never happened before. AND, the fan should just stop when there is nothing running.

EDIT: when I did video editing before, the fans would run loads and continue to run long after the editing was finished - that was the only time I had fan problems before.

Relevant System Information:
Lenovo E490 8GB RAM, Intel UHD Graphics 620

What I’ve Tried:
Getting advice from ChatGPT and stopping processes and other things. I’ve stopped Brave from using graphics acceleration + stopped background processes (on the advice of ChatGPT - to see if that has any effect).

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

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Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse!

I have the AMD version of that one, E495 and my fan is off most of the time; but that is not a given, especially with lots of browser windows/tabs running JavaScript. You need to monitor resource consumption, CPU frequencies and temperatures over a longer period of time; might be some spiky workload that’s causing the heat. Once there is some heat soak it may take a while to subside, even when the CPU is totally idle. But you should probably start with the CPU frequency governor / power profile, to see if it’s set to performance, which just spins the cores at max frequency.

BTW, ChatGPT isn’t running locally, per chance?

That’s counterproductive because now your CPU is doing stuff a GPU can do more efficiently.

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Have you tried cleaning the fan and heat sinks? They tend to get clogged up with dust over time and can lead to heat issues.

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Cooling involves control of two things which are “tunable”:

  • CPU Frequency, and
  • Fan Speeds.

For “how” and “how quickly” you want things to cool off, for approaches to “fine control” of fan speeds, you may wish to review the following discussions, with the first of these offering a useful script:


For control of how fast heat is generated, if you want a wrapper script for the CPU frequency control function, you might want to look at the one offered in the following discussion, even if only as a start-point to create your own customized tool.


As for system services, there is a possibility that something may have affected the thermald service (Intel-specific). For more about that, there is a discussion on the old UbuntuMATE Discourse and on StackExchange.
:slight_smile:

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That looks like a fancy way of reinventing cpupower:wink: OP should not need that.

As for reducing sources of heat, Firefox and Chromium have support for tab unloading, which this extension uses to great effect:
https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

The primary design goal of discard seems to be the reduction of memory usage, but it has the great side effect of also stopping all JS in discarded tabs. :grin:
One can effectively suspend the whole browser session by this little trick:

:smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

One should also block as much JS as possible. I am using an advanced setup of uBlock Origin, with some addtions. JS (</>) is globally disabled by default. That way, clicking that button to enable it, will only allow 1st party scripts and I can selectively enable specific 3rd parties. As you can see, that can become a little involved, but it is worth it, if you want to shave off every last clock cycle from your browser session.

And images bigger than 64K are blocked as well which takes care of most animated images which cost more CPU power than they’re worth most of the time. Plus, load times go way down. I can still enable individual images by clicking the empty frame in their place.

If you want to get really fancy, you can explore systemctl freeze. The Firefox Snap is started as a systemd scope, which follows this naming scheme: snap.firefox.firefox-<UUID>.scope. So when I want to freeze all FF instances I just run:

systemctl --user freeze snap.firefox.firefox-\*.scope

That way there is absolutely zero CPU load from FF, when I am absolute positive I don’t need it for the time being but don’t want to close it either, because session restore is a drag.

systemctl --user thaw snap.firefox.firefox-\*.scope

brings FF back to life.

Maybe such things can be automated in a not so distant future, i.e. all apps that go out of focus are automatically frozen, unless explicitly overridden. I’ve read that Windows 8 did something like that with “Tiles”. It may even be something that Android does.

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thanks for the replies guys.

i can definitely clean the fan.

here’s the thing: i can use the laptop all day with 15 tabs.

no fan going overload.

let’s say i open 25 tabs - now it’s gone crazy.

so i close all 25 tabs and sit there. the fan will still be going mad 1 hour later.

i’ve measured the heat - there is no heat. chatgpt got me to run some measures that told me me the temprature of different parts.

solution: turn off and turn on. problem solved.

that suggests to me it’s ubuntu going faulty?

is there anything missing in my logic?

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Maybe the very ChatGPT you’re talking to. LLM’s tend to run on the GPU rather than the CPU and monitoring the former isn’t as straight forward, so you might be missing that your iGPU is the actual cause of the heat, which you don’t see because you might be looking at the wrong sensor.

Other than that I can only imagine some fan control state machine stuck in some state it can’t get out of. Seeing as yours is a Thinkpad, I believe that could be some firmware component. I’ve never once had to fiddle with anything regarding fan control, curves, thresholds and whatnot, because of Lenovo’s truly great heat management. But what if it does have some esoteric bug?
I do get fan activity which I cannot quite explain sometimes, but it is nowhere near as bad as you describe; my system is sitting totally idle, with almost zero load, and yet the fan starts spinning at the lowest level (3300 RPM) for a minute or two.

There’s also a chance that your 25 tabs in Firefox pushed your RAM usage over the edge to swapping out, given that you “only” have 8G of RAM. I don’t know if you’ve enabled things like Zswap or swap on zRAM, which might contribute significant enough CPU load.

And don’t forget that there might be some background system activity for updates. Especially the Snap daemon can cause quite some spiky load, so do unattended upgrades.

Last but not least, you probably shouldn’t just blindly believe/follow what some “Ai” is telling you, but you should elaborate more on what exactly you have done, so we can get the picture; nobody will be able to reproduce what you have done without that.

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Maybe this post might lead to a solution, or this for a deep dive into fancontrol

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One additional question, what temperatures did you observe? If at all possible a graph over some 10 minutes should give a reasonable overview. Just because you or the “Ai” say “there is no heat” doesn’t mean that the fan controller sees it the same way. For instance, sustained temps over 50°C will have the fan running at low RPM’s all the time. And dust on the wings or in the mesh covering the fan only worsens that outlook. If it has never been cleaned, it is high time to do so; you will need to open the device to properly clean the wings.

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From terminal enter sensors to see the temperatures or install psensor to have temperature monitor

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I have been searching the replies in this topic wondering why no one has mentioned System Settings>Power>Power mode. Then I read this:

I am sorry Peter. Could you say that again in English? :/wink. Reading that has cheered me up greatly. Thank you.

Google AI says this about the Lenovo E490

The primary heat exhaust vent on the Lenovo ThinkPad E490 is located on the left edge of the laptop, near the screen hinge.

The laptop pulls fresh, cool air in through the grilles on the bottom base, circulates it internally across the processor and heatsink, and expels the warm air out through the exhaust vent on the left side.

We need to be careful not to reduce the airflow in and out.

To conserve battery power fans on modern laptops are small and do not rotate fast enough to reduce temperature rapidly.

I do not think that these modern thin laptops (I have one - Intel i7 & Intel UHD graphics) are up to the tasks run on desktop and work station machines. They are designed to be air-cooled and almost silent.

I think that Gnome and Ubuntu have improved the power monitoring and control greatly over the years without making things difficult for ordinary users like myself to understand.

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You already have. :wink: But, since I don’t actually use those tools, I tend to forget how to explain them, so I wanted to at least throw that in for consideration.

Yikes! Lenovo has great manuals, which can be found on their support site.

If this my E495 is anything to go by, it’s the other left. :winking_face_with_tongue:

The Lenovo design is quite good in that those side vents cannot be easily obstructed.

These Laptops sport CPU’s/APU’s in the 15W TDP (Thermal Design Power) range, so they don’t need jet turbines to be cooled. And they do a phenomenal job at running desktop and workstation tasks, within reasonable expectations. As an illustration, when I bought this laptop I put it through a quick GeekBench comparison with my tried and true desktop machine (AMD Phenom II X4 965) and, what can I say, it has twice the compute power of that electricity guzzler, which consumes 100 W wall power when idle; my electricity bill does show the difference.

Best purchase I ever made.

But monitoring GPU load is still not straight forward, may even be impossible for GPU compute. I wouldn’t know how to do that, not for lack of trying.

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