Studio XPS 1647 fan goes on randomly

Is it normal for the Fan to turn on under minimal load? In my XPS 1647 i5 430M, the fan would go on for a few minutes, silence for 20 secs or so and then turn back on again.

 

That's normal, all it's doing is that at idle it's just beyond the mark for when it turns on the fan, it turns on the fan at say 40*, the temp lowers to 38* at which point it turns it off, then the temp starts to slowly rise again untill it hits 40. I don't know the exact numbers but that's how it works, if you can get your computer to run a little bit cooler then the temperature shouldn't reach that point.

 

Thanks for the reply. I came from using the M1530 and the fan on the laptop stays on with a very quiet fan. So I can hardly hear it. The xps 1647 in comparison can be very loud at times when the fan goes to insane spinning mode.

 

That's exactly the behavior that makes me mad...problem is that first level of the fan is about 3000RPM, which is too much so when I'm using the laptop in a quite environment it sometimes becomes too loud...
I already proposed to Bill_Dell to tell engineers to adjust fan levels in bios to make the first fan level like 1200-1500RPM which would be nearly silent and still would probably be able to cool the laptop down when doing easy tasks/idling.
Bill said something like that he forwarded it to some engineers and that I can expect some such tweaks in upcoming bios. But it was way before A09 (for 1645) or A07 (for 1647), which sadly do nothing about it...

 

If you're really up for it, you could try using a BIOS modding tool to find the values for fan speed, temperature and times. It shouldn't brick your system as it's only the temperatures that would change and nothing else, I'd still only try it if you really know what you're doing though.