R61 fan noise while playing dvds

I've got an R61 with T7100 processor, 2 gb ram. Everything is working great except when I play dvds. The fan continually cycles during playback. Depending on the movie, the fan will cycle non-stop, or with a slight pause (maybe 1 or 2 seconds) between cycles. The cycles themselves last about 3-4 seconds.

Is this normal? Are there any settings I can adjust? I tried the Energy Saver, Power Saver and High Performance settings and had the same fan issue in each case. This basically makes watching movies without headphones impossible.

Thanks very much for any help on this.

 

Are you sure it's the fan and not the optical drive???

In my experience the spinning disc is almost always louder than the fan.

Do you experience the same problem when playing back a video file from the hard drive (e.g. an *.avi or *.mp4). If you don't have one to test you can download a show from Revision3 and select XviD or large quicktime.

If it is the optical drive, you can adjust the speed. On my T40 I had normal, high performance, and "Silent". The latter speed was horrible for random access, but it was much quieter for video playback.

 

Hey jonlumpkin,

Thanks for the reply. I think you're right about it being the optical drive. I went to the control panel > device manager > dvd-rom drive but didn't see any settings to adjust. If you were referring to changing the Power Options, then I tried all 3 settings and it seemed about the same.

So maybe this is how the optical drive always sounds. Seems a bit odd but if this is normal then what can I do but get headphones I suppose. Is this standard practice for watching movies on Lenovos?

By the way, I don't have internet access at the moment so I can't check a video file from the hard drive. Thanks for the link though.

 

Play the DVDs using Intervideo Win DVD and you will have no un-necessary spins if you play the DVD using Media Player it spins crazy..I used to have the R61 myself.

 

That might help. Intervideo may lock the drive to 2x so that it is a constant low amplitude hum, as opposed the trash of a high speed DVD drive spinning up and down constantly.

If I recall correctly, you accessed optical drive speed settings in the following manner (at least on a T40 with XP Pro):

• Right click on desktop, select properties.
• Select the display tab
• Click Screen Saver
• Click Power
• Cycle through the tabs, I believe it was under advanced
• Adjust optical drive speed - you should have normal, high performance, and slient
• Apply changes (it may ask you to restart, but this isn't necessary)

Even if you do reduce the noise, an optical drive will always generate more noise and use more power than a hard drive. I would recommend that you rip the DVDs to your hard drive and recode them with HandBrake. The best scenario is to run them off a SDHC card in the internal card reader (this is silent, has no moving parts, uses a minimum amount of power, and is immune from the Active protection system [it won't skip if you move your laptop]).

 

Thank you both so much for the additional suggestions and step-by-step instructions. Sounds like there are ways to avoid the noise and I'll try them out when I get back tonight. I really appreciate this.