aaron c beals

for a while now, my t42 thinkpad has had issues with the chassis fan — it turns on at the slightest hint of continuous CPU utilization, eventually kicking into a “high gear” mode that involves mind-numbing whirring with an occasional pulse. i’m still working on manual control of the fan, which is normally handled by the BIOS, via an open-source fan control utility. in the short-term, what i needed to do was to hunt down the source of the CPU utilization.

first stop: process explorer, available from SysInternals. from this tool, i was able to determine that the at-fault svchost.exe was tied to the “HP Network Devices Support” service. the service apparently has a bug that HP hasn’t yet fixed. the service doesn’t do much other than locate your networked printer on a DHCP network. ideally, i’d be able to lock the IP address of the printer, but my newer router doesn’t let me do that the way my old Netgear did. so for now, i’ve made the service “Manual” and will turn it on only as needed. result:CPU utilization returned to normal and the fan died down.

next: better management of power and clock settings. in my search for a fan-control utility, i stumbled upon this gem: Notebook Hardware Control. i know that the domain name seems a tad sketchy, but the software does everything promised, with minimal overhead. NHC allows you to track and set clock speeds, power saving modes, and internal temperatures. if you have a laptop, i highly recommend installing NHC and giving it a try.