Re: Cooling a HP desktop

On 6/1/2026 9:31 PM, Paul wrote:
> On Mon, 6/1/2026 4:15 PM, sticks wrote:

---big snip---

> But at least at the moment, you've corrected the worst part
> of what those idiots did. It should have had that fan in there.

First, thanks for your valuable input, as always!

Well, I thought I had the problem all sorted out, and yes, adding the 
case fan does lower the operating temperature nicely.  However, I 
noticed the temps creeping back up again when the computer idled for a 
long time.  One time it was up to almost 150F.  I believe the 
manufacturers believe this is an acceptable temp for this Ultra 5, but I 
see no reason to have it running that hot if I could find a way around 
it.  So I began my search for why when left unattended it was doing this.

After many, many suggested fixes working with AI, nothing really worked. 
  Processor upper and lower powers, eliminating anything in device 
manager that had power options to turn off a device, anything on the bus 
that had power options was turned to not allow, and many other things I 
can't remember at the moment.

I decided to install Fan Control, and that again helped, but didn't 
solve the problem.  In the end, nothing mattered as the system after a 
period of inactivity assumed the system was idle and turned the fans 
off, amazingly.  I even gave it a special task in task manager that was 
supposed to override the windows attempts to slow things down.  Didn't 
work.  The case fan does not have a speed sensor evidently, but Fan 
Control does allow me to manually set it to run at different levels, and 
I have it set for 60% for these summer months in the garage.  Not sure 
if it is windows or HP, but neither cared and after an unknown exact 
time both fans continued shutting down no matter what I did.

What finally after two days appears to work, is a software mouse 
activity tool.  I installed Mouse Jiggler and for an hour and a half in 
85F garage it stayed right at 100F with both fans continuing to work.  I 
set the time to jiggle at 49 seconds, after thinking it might even 
decide to save power after one minute, and it seems to work.  Defender 
did not block the app, but just to be safe I went ahead and whitelisted 
it.

Now, I'll just monitor it for a while and hope it all works.

-- 
Science Doesn’t Support Darwin. Scientists Do