I have a TR3A.  I recently made a comment in another thread that the fan was so quiet I was not able to tell it was there.

Now I am not sure it is.  How can I tell if it’s on?  I thought I should be able to feel warm air coming out the left side but I never do.

Is there something I can do to make the computer get warm enough to turn the fan on?

I usually use a laptop cooler pad at home (which works great) but when I am out it would be nice to know the fan is doing it’s job.

Well you could sit the TR on something like a bed or couch cushion.  Where the heat will build up quickly.

Then run some CPU intensive programs and wait to what happens.  Keep a close eye on it.  Extra heat is not something that you should purposely subject any computer too.

[quote author=“AndyMac”]I have a TR3A.  I recently made a comment in another thread that the fan was so quiet I was not able to tell it was there.

Now I am not sure it is.  How can I tell if it’s on?  I thought I should be able to feel warm air coming out the left side but I never do.

Is there something I can do to make the computer get warm enough to turn the fan on?

I usually use a laptop cooler pad at home (which works great) but when I am out it would be nice to know the fan is doing it’s job.

I know that my TR3 fan is runing as I can feel the air being blown out of the exhaust port. Mind you, we are not talking about huge volumes, but it is enough to notice the difference.

By the way, I do NOT use a cooling pad so the fan turns-on quite often if I demand a lot of CPU power.

Tear a small strip of tissue paper and see if it flutters while next to the fan area. In many cases, it won’t because the ULV Pentium M runs so cool that it barely needs the fan to be spinning with the heatsink doing a good job of passively cooing it. Also, the fan used in the TR is damn quiet with a barely a whisper.