Laptop overheating, not sleeping (Windows 10 Pro work / workplace setup)

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wadmafo

New Member
I've recently started a new job and am in charge of my own system administration. This workplace requires Office 365 (Microsoft Teams, Outlook, etc.) and enterprise software. In addition, I'm going to be using Hyper-V, VSCode, WSL, and other development tools.

I bought a refurbished Dell Latitude 7490 and followed Hellbovine's Guide: Optimized Image to re-image my device. My main goal was to get rid of ads and software like Cortana to have a machine that's good enough to use for software development.

Right now, my machine seems to be stable, but not as usable as I'd like it to be. It overheats and makes a lot of noise from the fan, and doesn't sleep when the lid is closed, which I can't seem to change in the power and battery settings - all I can do is turn off the screen. I've resolved to shutting my computer down regularly, but this is inconvenient. Microsoft Teams / Office / Hyper-V might be the culprits here, but I can't get away from using them.

It's entirely possible that this is a hardware issue and I should return this laptop, but would a different setup be better for me? Not looking for high performance, just usability.
 
General overheating can be caused by many things. sometimes just a blow through the vents with some compressed air ( in an aerosol ) can help. Batteries on a laptop do heat up quite a bit, but i very much doubt it would be the preset causing it.

With a lot of places, when they say they 'refurbish' things, they do actually check every part, but a big company like amazon, i honestly don't think they have a 'in house' team in every location to fully inspect and check everything., and by sending it off to 3rd party vendors, then all that can be taken is their word. I would check to make sure it is clean all the way through, and run something like HWMonitor to see if any certain component is overheating.
 
If you want to leave the laptop on all day then the easy solution is probably to change the power plan. Go to the control panel and switch to the Balanced or Power saver plan and see how that goes. You could also turn hibernation (fast startup) back on and see if that helps your situation.

In general this is a really common complaint though, even for people that don't use NTLite. While researching various things I've read through countless forums of people having the exact same issue where a laptop will overheat when it's supposed to be in some form of standby. This is due to various bugs in Windows, apps, and drivers, but also because laptops have extremely poor cooling and will overheat just from regular usage, even on a default install. It's not limited to Windows either--all the chromebooks I've used overheat after about 1-2 hours of playing an app game, and I had to buy a cooling pad to stop this. Keep in mind that ChromeOS is infinitely better than Windows for a laptop too, yet these problems persist.

There's so many things that can be responsible for this issue, such as a particular program that is running in the background and keeping the system awake, as well as laptops having less BIOS options to tinker with which can be a culprit too. If you end up pinpointing your specific issue to the preset though, please let me know.
 
i used to have a very badly ventilated laptop, and boy did that cook areas that shouldnt have been cooked. always make sure it has an adequate airflow too, and as Hellbovine has suggested, maybe a cooling pad will help.
 
Google has a lot of comments on Latitude 7490's overheating. If you've checked the BIOS revisions, then I would ask Amazon to swap this with another unit. It might not be an improvement, but might as well take advantage of their policy while you can.
 
wadmafo said:
...doesn't sleep when the lid is closed, which I can't seem to change in the power and battery settings - all I can do is turn off the screen...
Click to expand...
For this issue in particular, there is something you can look into if you're comfortable playing in the registry. All the usual registry disclaimers apply though, since you can brick your Windows install while messing with power keys if you modify one incorrectly. Read through all the instructions before attempting to begin. Also, it's worth mentioning again, be sure to change the active power plan to Balanced or Power saver if the computer is intended to be left on and idle for long periods of time since the High performance power plan is not designed for that.

POWER OVERRIDES
Download and open the "Power.txt" attachment, then open Regedit and paste each path into the address bar, and specifically look for any of the following 4 key names that may appear under each path:

"OverrideACSettingIndex"
"OverrideDCSettingIndex"
"ProvACSettingIndex"
"ProvDCSettingIndex"

The above keys all act as a type of policy that tells the power plans to ignore any user-settings as well as the normal Windows defaults. Deleting any of these keys you find (not the whole path) will then allow the power plans to use the normal defaults and also user-settings. The normal defaults are labeled as, "ACSettingIndex" and "DCSettingIndex" without any prefix text and should be left alone during this process.

After you are done deleting keys, head over to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power in Regedit and then delete the key named, "SystemPowerPolicy" and reboot the computer to have it restore all power plans to their normal default settings (override/prov keys you deleted will not return).

The "Automate.reg" attachment will do all the above steps for you, just save it to your computer and double-click it to run, then reboot the computer afterwards. You probably will not find any "Prov" keys in these paths, but I don't have different models of laptops to confirm this with, so I included those keys just in case.

If the above steps do not solve the settings pages being locked (or other related issues) then do a search for override/prov keys in the PowerSettings registry tree, investigate what they are, and if they are related to the problem then delete those too. If the problems persist at this point, then the issue is elsewhere, but these registry keys are the first thing I'd look into since it's the most likely cause.

It should be noted that this problem has nothing to do with my optimized image, it's actually an intended feature by Microsoft, and I talk about it in the "Known Issues" section of my guide. Windows dynamically sets these override/prov keys when it detects the power capabilities of the computer during installation of the operating system, and it is more aggressive about applying these to laptops than it does on desktops.
 

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Dude laptop refurbished!!? are you sure ? I wouldn't believe it.
Unscrew it, check the fan, clean it, replace the paste, possibly the fan, if it needs to be replaced, buy a cooling pad and it must be fine.
See how weak this laptop has cooling!!!

screenshot_26.jpg
 
wadmafo said:
I've recently started a new job and am in charge of my own system administration. This workplace requires Office 365 (Microsoft Teams, Outlook, etc.) and enterprise software. In addition, I'm going to be using Hyper-V, VSCode, WSL, and other development tools.

I bought a refurbished Dell Latitude 7490 and followed Hellbovine's Guide: Optimized Image to re-image my device. My main goal was to get rid of ads and software like Cortana to have a machine that's good enough to use for software development.

Right now, my machine seems to be stable, but not as usable as I'd like it to be. It overheats and makes a lot of noise from the fan, and doesn't sleep when the lid is closed, which I can't seem to change in the power and battery settings - all I can do is turn off the screen. I've resolved to shutting my computer down regularly, but this is inconvenient. Microsoft Teams / Office / Hyper-V might be the culprits here, but I can't get away from using them.

It's entirely possible that this is a hardware issue and I should return this laptop, but would a different setup be better for me? Not looking for high performance, just usability.
Click to expand...
To check if it's due to the NTLite changes, please attach the preset used for testing (remove any private info from it if any, like password or product key). E.g. auto saved xml from the resulting ISO root.
 
Hellbovine said:
If the above steps do not solve the settings pages being locked (or other related issues) then do a search for override/prov keys in the PowerSettings registry tree, investigate what they are, and if they are related to the problem then delete those too. If the problems persist at this point, then the issue is elsewhere, but these registry keys are the first thing I'd look into since it's the most likely cause.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply. Switching to Balanced Plan quieted the fan down, which is a lot better, but the computer still can't sleep, even after removing the specified entries. The High Performance plan also disappeared from the menu (I did make a backup of my registry keys). Looking at the directory of keys under Power, there are a few other Prov/Override entries. On Monday I'll be able to show a screenshot of what I've found. Are these entries documented anywhere, or is this something that you or the community figured out on your own?

nuhi said:
To check if it's due to the NTLite changes, please attach the preset used for testing (remove any private info from it if any, like password or product key). E.g. auto saved xml from the resulting ISO root.
Click to expand...
Will send this on Monday. I didn't think to check how well the machine runs out-of-the-box, so I don't really have anything to compare it to.

To everyone who suggested getting a cooling pad, that sounds like a good idea, I'll see if I can find one. If I get to the point where I need to open up my machine, I'll probably return it.
 
wadmafo said:
...but the computer still can't sleep...
Click to expand...
If it were my laptop, the steps below are what I would do at this point, to try to save time and get to the source of the problem quicker. The big thing right now is we just don't know where the issue is coming from, so once we figure that out we can fix it easily:

1) Check for a BIOS update, and if there is one be sure to reset the BIOS to defaults before installing the update, then reset it to defaults again afterward. Some BIOS can be buggy and this will save a lot of headaches doing it this specific way.

2) Next, go into the BIOS and explore all the options, which are likely to be extremely limited, since it's a laptop (they are usually gimped). Look at all the options that can be related to power savings, which will be things like C1E (C-states) and make sure they are toggled in a way that allows the computer to sleep and go into the different forms of standby. Googling each setting will usually give you enough information to go on, but if you get stuck just ask us here and we can help.

3) Did you make sure to install all your drivers? Laptops have a ton of drivers compared to desktops, and that might be where the issue is coming from too. Yellow exclamation marks in Device Manager signify missing drivers.

4) This guide (link) is worth reading through to make sure you aren't accidentally causing a problem or overlooking something important in your typical Windows install/usage. It would probably save a lot of time in the long run to go ahead and follow that guide from start to finish and cleanly install an unmodified Windows, so that you have something to compare against. For all we know this issue could be stemming from programs you installed or from my optimized image. We need to eliminate as many variables as possible in an effort to get to the root of the issue faster. If the problems persist on an unmodified Windows, then it's probably just a BIOS or thermal paste issue and troubleshooting is basically over.

5) It could also be that the detector switch on the laptop lid is broken and isn't recognizing that your lid is closed, which is why it won't sleep.

wadmafo said:
...The High Performance plan also disappeared from the menu...
Click to expand...
This is normal on laptops, Microsoft intentionally made it so that only the "Balanced" option appears by default, unless you switch plans, which on a laptop requires command prompt (powercfg) or a registry edit (ActivePowerScheme). I haven't yet tinkered if it's still possible to make all 3 plans always visible on a laptop, there used to be a method, but I think in one of the newer versions of Windows Microsoft killed it off.

wadmafo said:
Are these entries documented anywhere, or is this something that you or the community figured out on your own?
Click to expand...
I had to spend months figuring most of it out on my own, and there's still stuff I don't know about power settings yet. I had to put the rest of it on my to-do list to revisit later because there's just so many power options, and most of it is undocumented so it requires a lot of time and effort to test them all and decipher what they do. I haven't found any resource that discusses the hidden override/prov stuff, but even the ~142 individual power settings are mostly unknown by the internet too.

wadmafo said:
...getting a cooling pad, that sounds like a good idea, I'll see if I can find one. If I get to the point where I need to open up my machine, I'll probably return it.
Click to expand...
I use this pad (link) and I really like it, all my Chromebook overheating issues went away and it's not loud either. I was going to mention trying to change the thermal paste on the CPU too, but that's not a viable solution for most people because laptops are designed in a way that you have to take the entire thing apart, and putting it back together again is a whole different story. Unfortunately, this is likely where any heating issue is coming from, because thermal paste can dry out in as little as 1 year under hot/dusty conditions, and since this laptop is older it could basically have no paste left if they didn't replace it during the refurbish process.

Taosd mentioned earlier too, did you download a tool like HWMonitor or Speccy to check the temps of everything? If so, what were those results?
 
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