Fan On The Left Side of Laptop Only Working Occassionally

The fan on my laptop only works occassionally (I estimate it's about 15% of the time). The fan won't work most of the time then, occasionally (usually at least once a day) when I'm playing quite low resource games or using my web browser the fan will randomly turn on, it seems to always stay on for at least 1 minute after turning on, but then after a minutes it suddenly turns off.

Most of the time the fan jsut doesn't turn on at all even when the left side of the laptop is like 35-40C.

Error Messages I Get When I Turn On The Laptop ON After It Overheats:

Most of the time the laptop turns off suddenly, when it turns off suddenly I get error messages when I turn it back on that tell me that the BIOS detected the fan wasn't woorking.

The error code I usually get is 90B Iirc.

I typically get two error messages when I first turn on my laptop again after it shuts down due to being quite hot.

General System Specs:

I am using Ubuntu 20.04.02 LTS

Here are the specs for my laptop: https://pastebin.com/AvtFKTGb

Things I've Tried & Possiblre Causes:

I remember at some point in the last few months trying to use pwmconfig to fix this problem, and it did seem to increase the frequency with which my fan turns on.

The only theory I have currently is that sometimes the left side of the laptop goes over a certain temperature (my guess is it's a high threshold) and the fan automatically turns on until it goes below that temperature whilst the chassis remains at a high temperature.

Also, I had a ton of dust removed from the system about 2 months ago, Iirc it did help a little bit but only 5-10%.

Details About WHen The FAn Chooses To Work:

I've also noticed that when if I put my laptop into hibernation mode enough times then the fan will randomly turn on at the same time that the laptop exits hibernation mode, the fan will usually stop working but it seems to be after a longer duration like say 5-8 minutes instead of the usual 2-4 minutes from when it randomly turns on whilst I'm using the laptop.

If I remember correctly in the past when I first got this laptop (about 5 years ago) the fans worked and were on pretty much all of the time without issue (granted it was on Windows 8.1 originally then Windows 10).

My situation shares similarities with this person's situation: Notebook keyboard gets hot only on the left side! in that only the left side is getting hot.

I didn't use it for a few years after that due to the hard drive dying and not knowing what the problem was or how to fix it.

In case it's relevant I did install more RAM into the laptop about 7-9 months ago, got it off of ebay I think, went from 4GB-16GB.*

Some screenshots I took from when the fan suddenly turned on whilst I was using the laptop during the writing of this: Here's a picture I took of just after the laptop's fans stopped working today, the information above the sensors command was the sensors info I got when the fan was working

Solution 1:

BIOS

You've got a very old BIOS version F.17 from 08/07/2013. There's a newer BIOS available, version F.39 Rev.A, dated Apr 21, 2017, and can be downloaded here.

Note: Confirm that I have the correct web page for your model #

Note: Have good backups before updating the BIOS

Note: You may also have a problem with old thermal paste... but we'll discuss that later.