Noisy fan & hard drive access

[tribalboy]

Hi Guys,

I have a Dell XPS 15 i7 (second gen) with 8 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD running 11.10 and am using the wireless connection to access the internet. The fan on my laptop seems to be making a lot of noise and I see the HDD access light flickering most of the time even though I only have chrome running. It could be that it is trying to write some cookies to the disk or something but the thing I am worried about is the fan noise.Is this normal

[Mark Phelps]

What is "normal"???

But seriously ... there have been lots of reports of overheating with PCs using 11.10, and have not seen the kernel patches for fixing this coming out yet.

So at present, unfortunately, getting overheating with 11.10 is more "normal" than it would be otherwise.

There are utilities that can be used to slow down the fan -- but with a laptop, I would strongly advise AGAINST using them, as since the fan is trying to cool down the CPU, slowing down the fan is only going to cause it to overheat and burn out.

The hard drive access is "normal" too. Where do you think the PC is writing all of objects that it's downloading from the Internet to render the web pages?