Any tips to reduce or prevent the fan from starting up

[malberttoo]

Just FYI, Windows 8 and beyond know when you have an SSD, and it no longer attempts to defragment it, it only optimizes it (TRIM).
Think of defragmenting as a 2 step process: identifying empty space(TRIM), then physically moving everything around to compact the amount of empty space to minimize head movement in the future.
Well an SSD does not have a head- that's why it's so fast. So moving the data around becomes pointless. It is still useful, however to tell the SSD what space is no longer used, so that it can write over it care-free. This first step of defragmenting is now called a TRIM command.
A TRIM command tells the SSD which parts of the drive are now considered "deleted", so it can continue day to day operations without having the overhead of trying to figure out what space it can use and what space is holding actual data. This operation does not "use up" any of the drive's usable life.
So you'll notice that Windows has changed a lot of the wording on the "Defragment" screen to now say "Optimize".....

Now you know why.

Welcome to the forum Spicy! Thanks for the detailed info, I learned something new!

On an SSD you should not defrag fore the reasons already stated as it will mostly wear the drive unnecessarily.

That's the way I always understood it as well, puts a lot of unnecessary write activity on the SSD.

 

[leeshor]

Windows 7 or 8 understand TRIM and they both allow current generation SSD drives to actually delete the empty space at idle to make it ready for the next write. Early SSD drive firmware wanted the OS to first clear the cell then write to it. Now the cell clear command isn't needed. That speeds things up too.

 

[Zog1971]

Just FYI, Windows 8 and beyond know when you have an SSD, and it no longer attempts to defragment it, it only optimizes it (TRIM).
Think of defragmenting as a 2 step process: identifying empty space(TRIM), then physically moving everything around to compact the amount of empty space to minimize head movement in the future.
Well an SSD does not have a head- that's why it's so fast. So moving the data around becomes pointless. It is still useful, however to tell the SSD what space is no longer used, so that it can write over it care-free. This first step of defragmenting is now called a TRIM command.
A TRIM command tells the SSD which parts of the drive are now considered "deleted", so it can continue day to day operations without having the overhead of trying to figure out what space it can use and what space is holding actual data. This operation does not "use up" any of the drive's usable life.
So you'll notice that Windows has changed a lot of the wording on the "Defragment" screen to now say "Optimize".....

Now you know why.

Thanks for this valuable info. So, last week when I was noticing the weekly defrag heating up my i7 and causing the fan to kick in, I told the system to no longer run the weekly defrag as many were saying not to do it. Do you think I should turn this feature back on? Are you saying that the defaulted weekly "defrag" is actually a good thing? Any additional info would be appreciated.

 

[the1spicymeatbal]

Thanks for this valuable info. So, last week when I was noticing the weekly defrag heating up my i7 and causing the fan to kick in, I told the system to no longer run the weekly defrag as many were saying not to do it. Do you think I should turn this feature back on? Are you saying that the defaulted weekly "defrag" is actually a good thing? Any additional info would be appreciated.

IMHO, because we are using devices with windows 8.1 and a brand new SSD, the weekly drive optimization is not detrimental to the health of anything. Instead, it is a good thing! Where things get hairy is the fact that heat is possibly detrimental to other things- like lithium batteries and my lap. I wouldn't think that SSD optimization should take much more than a minute, at most... but then again I've never really paid attention to exactly how long it takes. I wonder if there are other tasks (like microsoft's malware detection) that are running weekly that are truly causing your heat issues?

 

[Zog1971]

IMHO, because we are using devices with windows 8.1 and a brand new SSD, the weekly drive optimization is not detrimental to the health of anything. Instead, it is a good thing! Where things get hairy is the fact that heat is possibly detrimental to other things- like lithium batteries and my lap. I wouldn't think that SSD optimization should take much more than a minute, at most... but then again I've never really paid attention to exactly how long it takes. I wonder if there are other tasks (like microsoft's malware detection) that are running weekly that are truly causing your heat issues?

Funny, you should mention the malware detection as it was indeed also giving me issues. I actually ended up going with another AV software and disabled Defender and have been very happy and no more fan issues caused by that. So, seems like the defrag was making it do it on its own in my experience. I may try re-enabling it as I feel like there have been some improvements to heat and fan since the 8/19 firmware update. I'll let you know if I see any difference. Thanks for your help!

 

[Joana]

In my case the "System" is using a lot of memory... I change the indexing options like was instructed, but it doesn't solve my problem. (SP3 i5)

 

[theveterans]

I use IE11 with TPL exclusively and fans rarely fire up. I'm running iheart radio streaming music in the background and I get 3% CPU usage on idle. Fans hasn't even turn on yet and I've been browsing for at least an hour on my i5/4GB/128GB with background apps set to ON in privacy settings.

 

[Telstar1948]

Not exactly on point, but I noticed that Edge uses twice the RAM that FireFox uses. CPU usage is the same between them, but why twice the RAM for Edge?

 

[GreyFox7]

Not exactly on point, but I noticed that Edge uses twice the RAM that FireFox uses. CPU usage is the same between them, but why twice the RAM for Edge?

Id venture a guess at page caching including look ahead predictive caching. just curious how's it compare to Chrome?
AFAIK Chrome introduced this method of pseudo performance deception for which others have no recourse but to follow. i.e. appearing to be fast by prefetching pages the user might request.

 

[teodargent]

I'm guessing you have the i5/i7 version. I dont know anything that will prevent it, but to minimize it you could try undervolting. But there is something more direct you can try by lowering the CPU's frequency. MS removed power settings that allow you to force the CPU to run at lower frequencies. But that is 'easily' remedied.

On a side note, you can enable the power profiles that microsoft removed doing similar things. But here's what you want to do. Supposing 'Balanced' is your power profile, open a command prompt with admin privileges (I dont remember if necessary, but I always do this by default). Type in with enters after each bulleted command

• powercfg /setdcvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 50
  
• powercfg /setacvalueindex SCHEME_BALANCED SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX 50

What you just did was make your max CPU frequency 50% of what it normally is. Change 50 to the percentage you want. This forces my i3 SP3 to hang at 680Mhz

But you're not done yet. You need to reset the power profile. Type in

• powercfg /l

You will see something like

Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced)​

The text in red is the ID of the power profile. Copy it (right click->mark->highlight text->press enter).

Finally type

• powercfg /setactive 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e

Now your CPU will throttle only up to half its max. I'm not sure how it will work alongside turboboost but feel free to experiment.

Is this the same as setting the CPU max to 50% in the power profile (after activating the option)?

 

[Telstar1948]

Id venture a guess at page caching including look ahead predictive caching. just curious how's it compare to Chrome?
AFAIK Chrome introduced this method of pseudo performance deception for which others have no recourse but to follow. i.e. appearing to be fast by prefetching pages the user might request.

Weird ... I opened Edge, FireFox & Chrome together each on this site with only one tab open each - Firefox 167 MB, Edge 131 MB, Chrome 63 MB of RAM. No idea why it's different than yesterday. Nevertheless, Chrome is consistently using less RAM than the other two - around half as much. CPU usage each bounces around from 0 to 3% at idle.

 

[GreyFox7]

Weird ... I opened Edge, FireFox & Chrome together each on this site with only one tab open each - Firefox 167 MB, Edge 131 MB, Chrome 63 MB of RAM. No idea why it's different than yesterday. Nevertheless, Chrome is consistently using less RAM than the other two - around half as much. CPU usage each bounces around from 0 to 3% at idle.

There's more to it than just opening a page, it also matters where you've been and what background tasks you have enabled/disabled.

Google has taken user feedback about Chrome becoming a sluggish memory-hog

Not just with Windows Either...
Almost every advice column on how to improve MacBook battery life begins with the suggestion to avoid using Chrome in favor of Apple’s more efficient Safari browser. The idea that Chrome is a big and profligate battery drain on MacBooks has existed almost as long as the browser has been available, and most benchmarks reiterate it by showing Chrome’s gluttonous consumption of system resources for seemingly basic tasks.

You'd need to include all the other Chrome Tasks running as well not just the main task but that's true of the others as well.