Why is the fan so noisy?
It’s my brand new Dell XPS 14, and the fan is noticeably, annoyingly, incessantly… there. Not really loud by anyone’s measure. But it’s there.
And thus it started. Tweaking the power profile, downloading the latest firmware, tweaking the power profile some more, waiting for new firmware… nope. Still there.
What is making it noisy? CPU is heating up. Clocked the CPU down. Still noisy. What is making the CPU busy? Lots of unnecessary processes. Shaving them off one by one. Still there.
It’s the desktop. All my Ruby scripts, the conky bar, the Ruby file manager, mutt with all my extensions, vim with my hyperlist plugin, etc. Bits here and there constantly polling, checking, fetching.
Can I fix this once and for all? Can I get the fan to shut up?
The scratch
This was the birth of CHasm and Fe₂O₃. A desktop in pure assembly, with the major applications written in Rust. The itch that needed scratching. And with Claude Code, it was actually doable.
As I write this in my vim replacement scribe, the fan is silent, the CPU sits at 36 °C, and the battery drain is around 3.5 W with screen brightness at 80 %. Two sessions of Claude Code are working away on Workspace 1 and 2 while I type this in WS6.
Nerdvana
I have never experienced a desktop this snappy and this tailored to my needs. Not only a silent fan, but keybindings that feel natural and consistent, and programs that do exactly what I need them to do.
It’s pure nerdvana.
Link to this post: https://isene.org/2026/05/Fan.html