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Comment by MiguelHudnandez | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty hilarious. Until recently I didn't think of the CPU fan as an auditory cue for how hard your system is working. But now I can remember times that excessive fan noise has prompted me to investigate the cause of excessive usage.

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I had a habit of touching the strip of metal above the keys on my old macbook air, since that heats up before the fan becomes audible.

The sensible approach, of course, is to add a load monitor to the menu bar; now with my new m1 macbook, I can simply make the appropriate noises myself, as necessary. This is the UNIX way.

"MenuBar Stats" has a versatile collection of widgets to add to the menu bar. I'd prefer something open source though, if anyone has recommendations, please share.

Once you're running a tool like that, it is interesting to see the efficiency cores often saturated and the performance cores usually sleeping.

I've been using this one: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters

In addition to that I also use

https://github.com/exelban/stats

You can do this with xbar [0] (which is also just a super cool app). Looks like someone even made one specifically for checking the CPU throttling speed [1]

[0] - https://xbarapp.com/docs/plugins/System.html

[1] - https://xbarapp.com/docs/plugins/System/cpu-thermal-throttle...

[1] seems to use 'pmset -g therm' behind the scenes and it seems to not work on my M1 Air.

What I really want is a menu bar widget that detects apps using 100% CPU for more than a minute and offers to `kill -9` them. Has anyone made that?

Hearing the disk going used to be an auditory cue too, which is now gone thanks to solid state drives.

Yes, I miss that calming crackle telling me that my PC didn't lock up and it's just chugging along. And the floppy boot sound. Objectively worse but still nostalgic.

Like the demonic scream of a dot matrix printer

Occasionally with catastrophic results https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil...

That said, I don’t miss the noise or slowness.

Oh, yes. This has been an ongoing problem with "sleep mode", which users think means "off", but isn't really. Some Windows docs for hardware makers indicated that "sleep mode" should stop the fans, to maintain the illusion that the machine is "off". Some machines do that, and some stick to temperature-based fan control, so the fans continue to turn if the machine is warm. Some users then complain that sleep mode doesn't work because the fans are still turning.

And this is how I ended up buying a second Nintendo Wii. They turned off the fans and fried themselves.

I bought a Lenovo P1 Gen 3 a couple of months ago and the fans spin while the machine is sleeping.

I'd love to know if it's crappy thermal design from Lenovo, crappy CPUs from Intel, or Windows sleep mode being too demanding. Maybe it's all three?

It might also be naive firmware that expects the same thermal/cooling constraints when everything else is otherwise going to cool passively. Or even a design choice to actively cool so a quick wake will be in a better thermal state.

Depends on which A1, S2, S3, stage it is etc. And laptops differ from manufacturer to type and models.

Lenovo supports S0, S4, or S5 in their newest machines. I changed my settings to use hibernate (S4) rather than S5 (modern sleep).

Wait, why would the device get warm during suspend? Or do you mean a different kind of sleep mode? I'm thinking of the state where it just refreshes DRAM to keep its contents (this does not produce much heat at all) and everything else is off: that definitely does not require the cpu fan to run because the cpu is not processing any instructions during that state.

I assume not get warm, still is warm from running beforehand.

Hmm if that were necessary, then all power states should keep the fan on for a while after running, so a device that was shut down would also keep the fans on and there would be no need to put in a requirements document that the fans must turn off to give the illusion of having shut down? To my understanding though, if no new heat is created (usually mainly by processors like CPU or GPU), keeping the fans on is not necessary in regular laptops or desktops.

Some devices do some tasks while sleep, similar to Mac does.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-power-nap-m...

That would be useful for me today. Systemd again gone into some of those inifinite loops consuming 100% CPU in one of its daemons that try to replace what already worked before (systemd-resolved) today, while I was sitting in the train without AC.

I only realized something was wrong when the pinebook got way too hot.

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