The Dell Inspiron 1525 has a fan that whirs loudly from time to time. Now, I’m not exactly sure this is the way the machine was designed. What I found (from my friends’ machines) was that the fan revs up a lot when the CPU has to work harder on computing tasks. What does this mean? It means that you need to somehow prevent the CPU from working too hard so that the fan does not starting whirring too much.

Now, how do you control the CPU utilisation in your Dell Inspiron? Well, the answer does not lie in the hardware of the laptop. It lies in the software! By that, I mean the Windows Vista operation system. The thing about Vista is that it has a very funny CPU utilisation setting. The CPU in a Vista operating system usually is used very frequently and does not sit idle for very long.

Now, you have to go to the Control Panel in Vista and turn down the CPU and hard disk utilisation setting. Once you do this, the CPU will chug a lot less and hence, the laptop’s fan will need to cool it less. This, in turn, means that the fan will be less noisy.

Another way to resolve the Dell Inspiron 1525 ‘loud fan’ problem is to simply replace the fan. I know this sounds crazy, but I know some laptop repairers who can take Dells apart and slot in a quiter fan. Sometimes the stock fan that comes with the Dell laptop is simply not of a ‘quiet’ quality. If you know of a laptop repairer who can do this, go find him or her and ask about replacing the CPU cooling fan.