Feature Suggestion Thread for the Fan Control Utility

[christopher_wolf]

Hey all,

As the topic of this thread states, this is a thread where new features could be suggested and discussed, refined, then eventually implemented. I was thinking this would be a good idea seeing as how Shimodax's wonderful fan utility is such a big hit with all Thinkpad owners.

Have at it.

[NeoteriX]

Just a couple long range suggestions (and I know that many are already known to be hard to implement) to kick this thread off:

- Realtime graphing of fan speed and temp statistics (or also tracking the rate of temperature changes)
- Display of temperature, fan level in the system tray
- Automatic computer shut off, hibernation, or suspend when the temperatures hit user definable temp thresholds
- A slider interface for manual fan control instead of inputting numbers

[Trip]

Perhaps selectable profiles with different fan/temperature settings?

Would be nice to be able to just right-click on the tray icon and pick between custom settings for different situations (in class, busy areas, gaming, etc.).

[geoffrey]

Custom colours for the icons -- I can't see the difference between Yellow and Orange (at least, not at a glance)... Or, even better, option for display of highest temperature in the tray.

[BillMorrow]

ver .18 seems to be much improved over previous versions..

so,

maybe a Celsius/Farenheit value for temps..

for us americans who think 50 c. is cold..

[pipspeak]

There are options to start it the utility Smart and Manual mode, but what about starting in Bios mode too?

[CoolDragon]

Unicode support. On my system which is Chinese, the small circle after the temperature value is some wired Chinese character.

[BillMorrow]

There are options to start it the utility Smart and Manual mode, but what about starting in Bios mode too?

bios mode is the default.. no..?!

[christopher_wolf]

I think it is; yet I have noticed that, sometimes, it comes up with a non-BIOS controlled mode. Perhaps that is the issue?

[dino]

At idle, my southbridge runs much hotter than the rest. So I told FC to ignore PCI temperature but I'm worried the it might get too hot. I'd love to see a seperate fan threshold for the PCI temperature. Many, many thanks to the author.

[Bobby]

Interesting dino, the PCI is the one triggering the fan for me too. So you were brave and excluded it, could you please give us your temp for the PCI when excluding it? Do the fan ever kick in when you exclude the PCI?

[Bobby]

I just read another thread regarding disabling the wifi to reduce the heat and it looks like it's working. The PCI temp value is now pretty low but the GPU is ricing a bit more. Any comments on this?

[Navck]

Better stepping system (Instead of 0 to 7, maybe 0 to 14, giving us a "0.5" setting, instead of having to drive crazy with a hum.)
Have it quite whining about "error cannot read CPU" etc. (It'd be lovely if it didn't bother me about those)

[sugo]

Better stepping system (Instead of 0 to 7, maybe 0 to 14, giving us a "0.5" setting, instead of having to drive crazy with a hum.)

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed

[rimshot]

After a number of failed temperature readings, control is given to the BIOS. This is a very necessary safety feature. It would be nice, however, if the utility would get back into control once can it read the temperatures again.

[christopher_wolf]

After a number of failed temperature readings, control is given to the BIOS. This is a very necessary safety feature. It would be nice, however, if the utility would get back into control once can it read the temperatures again.

That sounds like a good feature to me.

Although it should be an option as an added "safety" mode since it involves doing "test" polls of the hardware to see if it can start reading the temperatures from the sensors properly again and that's adds to the overhead along with the exception/error handling that would have to go along with it.

[mario_jr]

I think It would be nice to control the cpu multipliers and its voltages.
thanks

[billyrom]

1) Option in fancontrol.ini file to disable writing to fancontrol.log so HDD should stay idle

2) Items for offset settings in fancontrol.ini file for every sensor (like NHC ACPI has)

3) Implementation of antipulsing algorithm

4) Native service version


Is there any chance at all, that there will be next release of this great utility?

billyrom

[Paul Unger]

I think It would be nice to control the cpu multipliers and its voltages.
thanks

Why not just use NHC with the T43 fan script? Discussed here:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=35380 with other urls referenced.

[christopher_wolf]

I think It would be nice to control the cpu multipliers and its voltages.
thanks

That's a bit outside the specialized scope of TP FCU and is already done quite nicely by other programs, as previously mentioned.

[enemyboss]

I would like to see an option to enable the Anti-Pulse hack used in the linux fan control script.

If understand correctly, the anti-pulse hack forces the fan into "disengaged mode" to ignore the sensors for a few seconds at the intervals when the embedded controller is expected to read the current fan speed and temperature sensors to compute the new speed.

I read this here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_control_fan_speed

I wouldn't mind the fan noise level on my T43 as much if it didn't have that pulse every 4.8s. I've been trying different settings to keep the fan off most of the time, but I would rather have the fan start on at a low level instead of undervolting to keep the system from getting too hot.

[Nick Y]

Delay to Start up of NHC

I would like to see the ability to delay the start up of NHC. I have NHC set to Dynamic Switching, but would like full processor performance at start up to get beyond everything loading up ; SpyBot doing an initial checks, etc.


(I have just started trying out something called NitroBoot, at present set to a 3 minute delay, but it would be nice to have the facility built into NHC.)

Nick

(Edit: Removed NitroBoot. I had assumed that delaying the start of NHC would have the processor running at full speed, but this is not the case.)

[abu_sme]

I would like to see the file output the temperature readings as a CSV (comma seperated value)

So instead of Fan: 0xc4 / Highest: 58°C (48 39 33 58 35 n/a 32 n/a 38 46 44 n/a)

It would be 48, 39, 33, 58, 35, n/a, 32, n/a, 38, 46, 44, n/a

And then the next line would be the same reading.


The reason i would LOVE to see this is so that I can do temperature maps to determine what temperatures I can expect to see during certain tasks. This would be primarily useful for the GPU temperature because it would allow for better overclocking profiles with ATItool. It would be cool if the fan RPM could be spat out too though.

[IJALB]

TPFC is a great tool!

Nevertheless I have some whishes:
*) different profiles and easy change of profiles
*) display the temperatures of all sensors in the icon-window (now I only have the hottest sensor and I can see all sensors jut in the log-files - but I don't want to use the log-files)
*) better version-information: the downloads normally have no version information. I'd like to have them at least in an readme file. It would be fine to have the version also in the file properties.

[inogen]

I'd like to be able to control fan RPM rather than just fan levels...

[nocturne.op.15]

I'm not sure if there is any more development, but I would appreciate time-based (and possibly geolocation based) profile switching. At home, there is absolutely no space for any fan noise, I want calm there. On the other side, at work, i'm usualy drown over by stack of cisco switches, server or anything else. Also at work, I usualy need much mode power than at home...