How to Reduce Laptop Noise

Does your laptop make a lot of noise and you want to know how to reduce laptop noise? This is a fairly common problem, fortunately, usually has several ways to solve it.

In this article we will review the most important ones, both very simple actions and those that may require additional efforts, as well as more and less common solutions.

In short a full range of possibilities to maximize the probability of success. So, let’s see what we can do to make your laptop quieter!

How to Reduce Laptop Noise

The main reason that the laptop makes more noise than necessary is due to its temperatures. If temperature goes up, then the cooling systems will adapt the circumstance, and increase the speed of fans and started making a lot of noise.

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1. Monitor temperatures and Speeds Properly

Before moving towards the solutions, we want to give you tools to check the effectiveness of the measures you take by monitoring the temperature of the laptop and the speed of the fans.

If you notice these values ​​go down, then you should also notice a reduction in loudness.

Our top recommendation is HWiNFO64 software, one of the most versatile and capable options on the market today.

Once installed, activate the sensors only option if you only want to see the sensors. When the program starts, it will surely warn you that one of the sensors is having problems monitoring. Always click on Do not monitor “this sensor” to avoid instability in the equipment.

Then, you will have access to all the sensor values ​​of the equipment, where the most important thing is to monitor the CPU and GPU temperatures.

If temperature goes ​​higher than 60, 70, 80 degrees or more, then they are surely causing the fan to spin faster, something that we are going to try to solve.

It is also reasonable to forget about monitoring and go directly to trying to apply the solutions. At the end of the day, what matters to us is to reduce the perception of noise from the laptop.

2. Clean the Dust inside

As we say, poor cooling is the main cause of a laptop making a lot of noise. As what we discussed above can be the solution, but especially if your laptop hasn’t been cleaned for a long time, it’s crucial that you do it.

Over the months, the small cooling holes that it has will accumulate dust, something that after (for example) 2 or 3 years without cleaning can lead to a gigantic obstruction in the cooling system.

The bad temperatures derived from this lead to the fan working faster due to the laptop’s attempts to reduce temperatures, increasing the noise very noticeably.

It may also become unavoidable to open the laptop to clean it from the inside, since what we can get out of the grids from the outside might not be enough.

It may also be the case that a very dense layer of dust accumulates on the radiator, which would be very difficult to remove from the grille, since it requires direct access to it and removing it with a brush.

See Also: How to Clean a Laptop Right-way

3. Forget mechanical HDD drives

Everything that we have explained to you above is free, since it does not take any financial investment to do so.

But now we make a proposal that does come at a cost: if you have an HDD in your laptop, replace it with an SSD.

Mechanical hard drives (HDD) are hardly used in today’s laptops due to their immense slowness and cheaper SSDs, which are also much more in demand by people.

But in addition to providing incredible fluidity, switching to an SSD reduces noise. HDDs have rotating parts inside them that produce a considerable amount of noise.

So if you replace a HDD with an SSD, what you will get is an incredibly smooth system, something that absolutely anyone who has tried one agrees on.

In addition to mitigating the noise of a component that has always been one of the great reasons for the high noise of the equipment.

And how do I know if I have a HDD? Its noise is very characteristic, and if the laptop is left to rest, it usually activates with great force as soon as we open the file explorer, in addition to making it vibrate quite a bit.

The easiest way to make sure is to check it in the task manager, since when you open the details and enter the Performance tab, it will tell us what type the laptop’s storage units are. If we have a HDD, we have a culprit.

4. Rule out Physical Defects

We must also assess the possibility that the fan is broken. When this happens your engine starts to make a lot of noise for no reason, and especially when you accelerate. You will notice this weird noise getting more and more noticeable.

This will be a fairly high possibility if you notice that the equipment makes noises that you have never noticed, and in particular it is also the case old equipment’s and its fans could be somewhat degraded.

If that happens, you’ll have choice but to replace the fans, a process that can be tedious as you’ll have to remove the entire motherboard from the laptop (depending on the case).

Here important thing is to identify the model of fan that is used and buy a compatible spare part, surely there is one.

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5. Solutions via Software

What hardware you have and how to makes hardware cool to reduce the noise. It all depends on     how the operating system manages hardware resources, something in which we have a lot to say.

The two main sources of heat in a laptop, and therefore the increase in noise, are the processor and the graphics card.

We should focus on reducing the amount of load they put on the laptop, both directly (by preventing programs from doing so) and indirectly (by establishing more conservative power profiles). This may also one way to reduce extra noise in laptop.

6. Nothing should hogging your CPU or GPU

Before starting to do anything, you have to check something that sometimes happens without us knowing.

There is some background process of consuming the CPU or GPU constantly, causing its load to increase a lot and therefore the noise of the laptop.

If you weren’t noticing a lot of noise before and suddenly your laptop has started doing it incessantly, then that may be the reason.

To diagnose it, open task manager and have it show all the details. Then, go to the processes tab, where by clicking on CPU or GPU you can have the processes that consume more or less be shown in order.

Check the ones that consume the most for both the CPU and the GPU. If you see that there is one or several that cover everything, then we have a problem.

It is possible that the process causing the problem is the web browser itself, in which case you probably have a tab making excessive consumption.

Sometimes it happens deliberately (crypto-currency miners on the web itself) or by mistake (poor programming of the site).

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Go closing each tab one by one until you see the problem disappears, and you will have discovered the great cause of your problems.

If you think that website might be mining then you should install a browser extension to prevent it.

If the process is something else, then inquire about it and find out what it could be. Sometimes, it can be processes of the system itself, such as a Windows Malware scanner, in which case the solutions are specific to each one (for example, they would require disabling some service).

In other cases, we will be directly facing malware that consumes the resources of your PC, generally with the aim of mining crypto-currencies and earning money at your expense. This would already involve a virus removal process, and passing programs like Malware Bytes.

7. Adjust your Power Plan

If you have followed the steps above and verified that there are no processes hogging the processor or graphics card, the next step is to adjust your power plan.

Basically, the operating system defines a specific power plan from which the frequency and voltage of your processor will be regulated in one way or another.

The higher the frequency, the higher the performance, but it also necessarily implies an increase in voltage that increases the consumption of the equipment and the fans of the PC.

So our priority is to have a conservative power profile, which makes the CPU run at lower frequencies and voltages.

In some cases, this causes a noticeable slowdown of your laptop, while in other cases you won’t even notice it. Don’t worry, because this is something that can be changed at the user’s will at any time.

A simple way to tell if the power plan can help you stop your laptop from making a lot of noise is to compare the behavior with and without the charger connected.

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When running on battery power (and especially when the battery is low) the laptop goes into more limited power profiles, and with the charger it will normally go to full power.

So if you see that plugging in the charger causes a big increase in noise then it is very likely that changing the power profile will make things easier for us.

8. Controlling Fan Speed

Many laptops also allow direct fan speed control, either by taking advantage of third-party programs like SpeedFan, an option in the BIOS, or a program provided by the manufacturer itself. At this point it would be very important to monitor the temperature.

Still your Laptop is Making Noise

If you can’t find a way to reduce laptop noise sufficiently, our last recommendation is going to sound a bit absurd, but it’s still effective: consider working with headphones and music, in such a way that the annoying noise is masked as much as possible.

In some cases, it will be an obvious solution that they already put into practice, and for others a patch that they are not interested in.

You can always take an advantage of the hardware forum, where you will enjoy personalized help to deal with your specific case.

Conclusion

A laptop that makes a lot of noise is a great nightmare for millions of people, whose productivity is greatly affected by this annoying circumstance.

In this article we have reviewed some of the most common and effective methods to try to reduce the noise generated by the equipment.

We have focused on providing hardware and software solutions, some examples:

• Promote cooling when placing the laptop, avoiding plugging cooling holes.
• Carry out an exhaustive cleaning of the dust, which also prevents good cooling and forces the fan to run at maximum speed.
• Check that there are no programs hogging all the CPU or GPU usage.
• Adjust the Windows power plan to focus less on high performance, such as a Balanced or Energy Saver.

We are not forgetting very specific things either, such as the need to stop using HDDs in favor of SSDs.

Mechanical discs have rotating parts inside them, and therefore generate a considerable amount of noise while in operation. We hope that this article has helped you reduce the noise generated by your laptop.