Firstly, pounding / banging on your laptop is a really bad idea. Don't do that. You might be physically damaging the fan. If the fan breaks, you will not be able to use your computer.

It's important that you understand the fan is there for a very good reason. If the laptop is unable to get sufficient cool airflow, it will overheat and stop working. You can't simply start banging on your laptop and expect it to continue working. It'd be like draining the antifreeze out of your air conditioner.

Next, you should be aware that the fan can spin for reasons other than CPU usage. Here are a few:

• If you're in a very hot environment without air conditioning, the fan might spin even when the entire system is idle. There isn't a lot you can do about that except move to a cooler area.
• Don't just look at CPU usage. Look at disk activity and GPU usage as well. In recent builds of Windows 10, you can easily see the disk and GPU usage in Task Manager in the Performance tab. Otherwise you'll need to use a monitoring tool like GPU-Z to monitor GPU activity. If any of them are consistently utilized beyond a few percentage points, even if the CPU is idle, this is likely your culprit. Your GPU will almost always make the machine very hot. The disk is less likely to consume lots of power, but it still could bump your machine over the edge to needing to use the fan.
• If your laptop is frequently used in areas that are very dusty or have pets that shed hair or dandruff (cat, dog, birds, etc.) the fan's output or the air intake may be partially or completely blocked with debris. You should try to carefully open your laptop -- assuming it's not one of those that isn't designed to be opened -- and gently clean out any dust. Don't force spin the fan because you might break it. Only use a dry cloth or an airduster; never apply any liquid to your computer's internals.

In general, attempting to "tweak" your computer software / BIOS to force the fan to come on less often is a bad idea. Leaving your fan control settings at default will ensure that your system's temperature doesn't reach dangerous levels. If you go in software and try to manually fiddle with these things, you might reduce the life of your system, cause early component failure or over-temperature throttling (which will greatly reduce the performance of your CPU or GPU temporarily to prevent it from overheating).

Your goal should be to help the computer exhaust hot air and take in cool air. If it can do this efficiently, the fan will stay off more often until you're using heavier programs like image/video editing or games.

If you're still dissatisfied with the frequency that the fan turns on and/or the noise it makes, I recommend buying some noise-cancelling headphones, playing some music and tuning it out. Many laptops have poorly-designed fan acoustics that does produce a rather annoying whine; you would generally want to determine this before purchasing the system in the future, to avoid being unhappy with your purchase. In most cases, RMA'ing your laptop for repair will not result in any improvement in this noise, as the most they could do is to replace your fan, but the new one will perform just like the old one provided that your current one isn't damaged.

One thing I can tell you for sure is that if you continue to "pound on" your laptop, you're going to break it. Most laptops -- except those that are extremely rugged, like the Panasonic Toughbook -- are not designed to be treated like that, and can easily be broken by a determined human. And if it does break because you pounded on it, please don't send it to the manufacturer for warranty repair. It's your fault for pounding on it; you should pay for the repair.

Hi Griffin009

I am Dave, I will help you with this.

1

Open the old Control Panel (click your Start Button, then just type Control and press Enter)

At the top of the old control Panel, set View to icons.

Open Power Options.

What Power Plan is set, is that the Balanced Plan, if not, set that to Balanced

And wait to see if the fans become quieter and intermittent

2

If not, close all open applications.

Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift +Esc)

Select the Processes tab

Wait until the fans are making a lot of noise, is the CPU, GPU, Disk or RAM at a very high percentage?

If one of those is at ahigh percentage, click that column header, so the arrow on that column header points down.

Please provide a screenshot of that Task Manager window.

Hi chenzhong1, 

Greetings!

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community.

I'm sorry to hear about the Fan noise on your Surface device. I appreciate the effort in running couple of updates on the device.

May I ask for clear screenshots on your Task Manager > under Performance Tab?

Even with less RAM and CPU usage, the CPU or device still needs assistance in terms of cooling process to give a good performance output. The core temp of your device might be stable because the Fan are constantly giving enough spins to maintain a good temperature and with good temperature this means better performance.

You can also adjust on how you want your CPU to perform, by selecting the battery icon on the task bar and adjusting the power mode. Setting the power mode to Recommended throttles the CPU and helps keep it running cooler with less need of assisted cooling. While a setting of Better performance or Best performance will allow the device to run more quickly, it will also allow the fan to come on more often to keep the CPU cool and performing it's best.

Try to also perform the methods below:

• Force the device to restart. Press the power button for 20 seconds while the device is turned on.
• Run the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit.
• Run the System File Checker.
• Install the drivers package manually.
• Check the specific OS build of your Windows Settings> System> About.
• Download the driver and firmware for Surface, choose Surface Laptop 4 and click download on the next page.
• Please choose the .msi file that matches your current OS Build and click Next.
• After the download, runand installthe .msi then Restart the Surface Device