X220 fan issues

[hans.x41]

Hello, I'm having some mysterious issues with the fan on my X220, which is running Windows 7 Professional, Service Pack 1. The fan runs normally most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't. I've been noticing these issues only recently, after using this X220 for a few years.

I want to be able to do the following (in order of priority):

1. Start the fan when the X220 is hot and the fan isn't running. I had this issue during a Zoom call, which is CPU-intensive.

2. Get the fan to calm down when it runs high (and loudly) when the X220 isn't particularly hot and the CPU is relatively idle.

3. Get rid of the "Fan error" problem at boot time, which happens occasionally, but seems to resolve itself if I try again later.

4. Simply be able to see, in real time, the X220 internal temperature and current fan speed.

What I did:

I started with Google: thinkpad fan control. The top result was "Thinkpad Fan Controller (tpfancontrol) - SourceForge". Before trying it, I searched to find other people's experiences with it.

On thinkwiki.org, it said that it works on an X220 (but didn't specify if that was on Windows or Linux).

I downloaded the program (TPFanControl) and ran unzip and setup. Then the Windows Start menu had the following menu item in it: "edit TPFanControl.ini". I followed the suggestions from another thread here on forums.thinkpads.com:

Open the folder where you unpacked the ZIP file. Edit the
fancontrol.ini file (right click, open with, Notepad). Make
sure that the "active" switch is set to zero and save the file.

...

Now, hold your breath and double click the FanControl.exe icon.

This should give you a window named "Thinkpad T43 Fan Control".

Specifically, I set the "active" switch to zero and saved the file. After that, there was no icon for TPFanControl.exe in the Start menu or anywhere (the Start menu still had the menu item "edit TPFanControl.ini". So I started TPFanControl.exe from the command prompt.

The result was that I did not see the application window appear as mentioned above, nor any icon appearing in the system tray, nor any visible evidence that the program was running, other than seeing the program name listed in the Task Manager. I did not see a UI like in the screenshot shown on thinkwiki.de.

I killed the process from Task Manager and tried again the same way, and got the same result. I tried again with "TPFanControl.exe --version" and saw a pop-up that said to use "-i" to install, so I tried that, but nothing different happened. I am logged in as a user with Administrator privilege.

This doesn't seem to be working. Anyone know what will actually work? Thanks.

[axur-delmeria]

It sounds like your fan is well on the way to giving out (the occasional "Fan error" message is a clue). It's probably better to replace it.