Z60m Fan Question with Celeron M

[chonine]

Hello, my Z60m only has a celeron M, which is all that I could afford. The performance deficit isnt what concerns me, but rather the reduced battery control. Happy to say that the battery meter still reports over 4 hours when full, with the screen brightness minimum and no wifi, just subtle usage.

With the thinkvantage power control settings, I set it up to be as conservative as possible on power when on battery. When on AC, I set it to "adaptive" performance and "balanced" fan control, as fan noises tend to upset me. (This is under fn-f3 > manage.) I am suprised to see that when I am on battery, the fan is very quiet, and rarely spins up. But when I am at the desktop, the fan is on more, and is louder. Now, this would make sense if I had a Pentium M with speedstep, but I dont. Rightmark shows a consistent 1.5GHz no matter what I am doing.

So my question is, if my cpu performance cannot and does not change depending on what I do, why does the fan appear to be adjusting to performance shifts that are not happening?

Thank you.

[chonine]

I wanted to add one question. BIOS appears to have settings for power management and fan control as well. IE what to do when on battery and when not. I assume that Windows settings override these? Makes me wonder why they are there in BIOS at all. (If you want to use an OS other than windows/linux I suppose.)