New BX575B owner has question about fan noise/regularity

Hi all, this is my first post, I just got my first notebook pc yesterday, a Sony BX-575B (1.86 centrino, 17", XP Pro). Wasn't able to find any reviews of this exact model, and very few of the BX series at all, but got an excellent deal on ebay, so I crossed my fingers and went for it. First impression is that it's a beautiful, if huge, machine, seems well made...... the screen doesn't seem to be as incredible as I've read the Xbrite is supposed to be, good enough, but nothing special. Actually, when it was first booting up and the screen was black, I noticed some "light" bleeding in on the bottom and sides, don't know if that's common or not, but doubt I'll notice it much in my activities anyway. I'm going to be using this beast as a multitrack audio recording workstation, and for some video editing......

Which brings me to the one real negative that I noticed right away; the fan immediately started up, and during the 2 hours I was on there, just going through minor set-up tweaks and reading the onboard literature, it kept turning on and off constantly, like it'd be on for 5 seconds, then off for 10, on and on like that, very erratic and annoying. And the fan does seem loud to me, though I don't really have any other laptops to compare it to, I don't remember them sounding like that in the stores when I was looking around. I could handle it though, if it were just on or off for longer periods of time, if I'm trying to record audio, I'm really going to notice the noise more if it's constantly fluctuating.

I poked around to see if there was anyplace to change the fan settings, but didn't find anything, not even in the power settings. I'll probably call Sony about this, but thought I'd try here first to see if this was normal, or if anyone had any ideas. Thanks for reading my lengthy post, I'm sure it won't be my last......

Thanks!

 

Hello fetaljunk and welcome to NBR!

I was considering a BX series earlier this year. The one thing that turned me off was the amount of heat created on the underside of the unit. Are you getting this? If you are, this may be why your fan is so active - it's trying to cool the unit down.

Javier

 

Hi Javier.....
It was only slightly warm after being on for a couple of hours the other night, but I wasn't really doing anything processor intensive, we'll see what happens when I start doing multitrack recording. Last night when I used it, the fan didn't start in with the on/off right away like it did the first time, it took a while to kick in, seemed to stay off most of the time, just coming on for a few seconds every once in a while. Unfortunately, I think I just got a loud fan. Guess I'll just have to get used to it. Luckily I don't do much recording with microphones, and when I do, I'll just have to find some way to keep the vaio away from me, maybe make some sort of little foam barrier to put around it.

One thing I noticed, reading posts on here, some people seem to have fan adjustment settings in their vaio power management. And on the Vaio website, I saw a picture of that dialogue box with a setting for "thermal control", which must be it. However, I don't have that setting in my power scheme setup. What a gyp.....

fetaljunk

 

I have the BX563B and my fan acts the same way... it's loud too.

Seems like this is normal on the BX series.

I got a laptop cooler and the laptop fan hardly came on.