Fan Control Software for Windows XP and Vista

What's the difference in battery life?

 

Hi @all!

It seems that "Tolyen" of this forum found a way to turn off the fan with bios v0.3304.
When this is 100% confirmed then i will provide the next version of AA1-Fan-Control in a few days!

PS: Please don´t send personal problem-emails to me ... if you have problems use this forum/thread ... Thank you very much!

CU Ralf

 

Well you really can't squeeze more power out from a 3-cell battery, so upgrading to a new bios won't give you extra-battery life. It's all about optimizing the operating system, the bios is quite good now.

 

What's the status of your new version?
I just got my new acer aspire one a150l and
the fan just s... you know^^

 

Works for me perfectly.

Since I often use the dual boot with XP I look forward to your update.

Michael

 

Does anyone have definite figures for the effect of the fan control software on battery life? I guess it's difficult given the variations in software and operating conditions for each user... but still...

 

Please see my previous post.
You can accurately test battery life using battery mark software.
I had provided the link to download it on my previous post.
Battery mark is the industry standard for laptop battery life testing.
I runs through a consistent set of cpu activity, hd activity, graphics, and office tool activity, that represents typical usage.
That way you get apples to apples comparison from every user.

My feeling is that you won't save any battery life turning off the fan.
The cpu fan probably consumes no more than 1W of power.
The acer battery is rated for 27Watt/hour. So if you let the fan run continuousely, it would consume no more than 3 watt/hour of battery capacity. Or you can expect at most 10% more battery life.
But having your cpu running at higher temerature actully causes it to draw more more. I think the over all effect is that you are at wash between the power you save not running the fan, but using more power having the cpu hotter. Also you'll be using more power running the fan program.(keep in mind the program is constantly writing to the system error log file which increases hard drive activity too)
So don't expect to get much more battery life using the software.

 

In the disclaimer it said that the software can destroy your computer (under the wrong settings), so I decided not to go with it. I'm not a very technical person so I can't count on myself to keep up with the right settings.

What do you think?

 

Hi - I've had the same problem with a brand new AAO/1GB/160GB/XP machine that I got today.

It's got the bios# 3301

The utility does not work - when it's supposed to be off, the fan is actually ON. Also tried with the other open source utility (http://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_aspireone.asp) - had the exact same issue with the 3301 bios.

Any ideas on a fix for this?

 

The fan control software works perfectly with aa1 150, 120 gig hdd version, upgraded to vista recently from XP. thanks a lot for the effort pal.
My BIOS version is 3114 pre-installed when i bought it.

 

The problem is, that with BIOS 3.301 Acer changed the settings of the embedded controller - the meaning of 0x1F and 0x20 was changed around. Before 0x1F was "off" and 0x20 was "on". Now it's vice versa - 0x1F means "on" and 0x20 "off", just 0x00 still seems to be "auto" - and maybe there are even more settings available now, it did not try it out yet.

Another point: The Windows system event log entries with warnings about "acpiec" - this is because Windows will notice, that the embedded controller was sending data, which was not requested by the acpiec-driver.

Since i also use Windows XP on the AAO i currently work on a tool, that will check the temperature using the MSR (machine specific register) of the CPU to avoid these event log warnings and get a more accurate reading and which will allow to define, which values to be used for the fan on/off setting - or maybe will automatically check the BIOS version to use the appropriate values. Another option will be to set a fixed display brightness setting - so the display will not change the brightness when connection or disconnecting external power.

Oh - and this tool does not need "TVICPORT" - it uses the open source "PortTalk" driver, just one single sys-file ;-)

Stay tuned...

 

A french programmer (NODA) is still writing a new fan control software (A1CTrl)
This software is compatible with bios 3114 and bios 3304.
You can set 3 temperature level. Off, On (slow), Auto
This software dont use TVicPort but the ACPIEC problem is not fixed.
You can try release 0.1 here: http://www.blogeee.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=84338#p84338

Thanks to him.

 

Good news :!:

 

As i explained - as long, as one just reads the EC registers as in acer_ec.pl (and i think literally all tools do this at the moment), you will always get these acpiec-warnings in the event log. The only solution is either using the CPUs MSR or to write a kernel driver locking the EC before accessing it. Since writing and testing a kernel driver is not that easy ;-) i prefer the MSR way (however - the final code will be C++ and open source).

 

It's the reason why SpeedFan cause no ACPIEC error's ?

 

Yes. SpeedFan does not use the EC, it reads the core temperature from the MSR (as well as CoreTemp or CPUID HWMonitor).

 

Ok, so it's possible to fix this problem.

 

Just to have something to play around with - my little command line tool, similar to acer_ec.pl, just for Windows (source included):

http://arnowelzel.de/download/aaocontrol-0.1.zip

There is no GUI, no automatic control - you can just "manually" set EC register values with a command line tool. A tool with GUI, core temperature monitoring, trayicon, automatic control etc. will follow soon.

 

Hello Everyone!

Now it really turns out to be a competition! But i will keep my work up, even if there are 3 more tools.

I released Version 1.1 ... now working with all knows bioses.



Download: http://www.computentsystems.de/aceraspireonefancontrol/

The ACPI-Error-Logs are still there, but i am working on it.

Have a nice day ... Ralf

 

Excellent! Thanks so much, man. We all appreciate your hard work!