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Laptop Fan Control Utilities
Fan control for the XPS 13 laptop has recently become a big issue. Dell laptops have always had rather poor fan control profiles embedded in the BIOS. Older laptops could usually be fixed using SpeedFan and, especially, i8kfangui. At some point, Dell changed how their fan control worked, and the add-on utilities did not work very well.
I had a little extra time today to dig a little deeper into control utilities. There has been a lot of work by Linux users on Dell laptops because of even poorer control with Linux. I was able to find a lot of hits for modified i8kfangui programs for Linux and some with Windows. Programs are:
i8kutils
i8kctl
i8kmod
One hit had a download for i8kutils for all Windows versions:
CurbedLarry
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February 23rd, 2015 03:00
Have found the developer of that utility has posted on here so have asked about Windows support:
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19579258
Also found the developer of SpeedFan is aware of issues controlling recent Dell machines under Windows, but clearly not a priority for them:
http://www.bugtrack.almico.com/view.php?id=1869
Considering Dell sell high-end gaming laptops it's strange that fan control is totally locked-down and/or broken. An extremely stubborn approach to power users in this day and age.