fan control

[Goose22]

I have a dell CPi runs great except fan. Fan doesnt run unless I quit windows and go into bios for example. dont know how to get to dos from windows 2000. How do i find the power control for the fan to set it to maximum cooling?

[CuratoR]

dont know how to get to dos from windows 2000.
You cannot drop to a real DOS mode from Windows 2000. You can however, boot straight to command prompt by selecting "safe mode with command prompt" pressing F8 before windows loads.

The fans on notebooks are configured properly and are often user non-configurable. Even if you don't hear audible fan-like sound, the fans inside maybe running.

Fan doesnt run unless I quit windows and go into bios for example.
The fans are configured to run and maintain their speeds according to the System/CPU temp. While the notebook is on and operating system is loaded and the notebook is not doing intensive work, the fans run at low speeds to avoid unneccasry power consumption,noise. Os like Win2K has built in mechanism for sending halt instruction to the CPU whenever the system is idle(just staying on, os loaded, no work being done), this stops the CPU from heating un-necessarily so fans run at very low speed. Thats why you're not hearing fans making noise.
In contrast, while you're on BIOS/BIOS setup, you can hear fans making noise becuz the fans are running at full speeds. Theres no mechanism to pass idle instruction to the CPU while on BIOS setup. Therefore the CPU gets heated un-necessarily which triggers the fans to run at their full speeds. So, its normal that you're hearing fans making noise while on BIOS and staying relatively silent after win2k loads.
Often fans run at their full speed for a short period after the system is powered on from an Off state.
So, its not strange that fans make much noise while on BIOS.
Theres no reason to worry if you're not experiencing lock-ups, crashes, random reboots etc.

You can also try to verify the condition of the fans while your notebook is on and os is loaded. Try to do some cpu intensive work, eg play a heavy game, compress/decompress large archives(zip, rar files) etc and observe carefully. You should be able to hear the fans speed increasing.

Plzz post back.

[Ichabod]

If you do a google search for Dell laptop overheating you will find that this is not a new problem. When my daughter's laptop started freezing I found a neat little utility that let's you access the fan control and set the fan speeds and temps to cure the problem. You can get it here: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/