A utility to quickly change the thermal mode on Dell laptops.
Warning: this software is provided “AS-IS” and the authors DO NOT take responsibility for any hardware failure that may occur.
You can find a MSI installer in GitHub Releases.
The thermal management on Dell laptops can work in four modes: Performance, Optimized, Quiet, Cool. Typically, those modes can be controlled by using an application provided by Dell (like My Dell or Dell Power Manager).
Not all users are happy to stay on one mode at all times. When using the laptop in one’s lap, the Cool mode may be more appropriate, but when the laptop is on a desk, the Optimized mode will probably be a better choice (since Cool has worse performance).
Also, the laptop may sometimes apply thermal throttling. While it’s best to fix the cause of this issue, and avoid your computer catching fire, you sometimes just can’t do any better.
It adds an icon to the system tray notification area. Clicking on this icon
reveals a menu that lets you choose your preferred thermal mode. There’s also
an Auto Fix option, that temporarily changes the mode to Performance for 5
seconds and restores the previous mode (if Performance is already set, the
temporary mode is Optimized).
There is also a command-line version available. Both applications communicate with a REST API that runs as a Windows service.
While the REST API and Windows Forms GUI are written in C#, there’s also some F# and Visual Basic.NET code.
The CLI and the client library are written in F#, because I wanted to play with the language and see how to get stuff done with it.
There is also an alternate CLI written in Visual Basic.NET, for no good reason at all. But hey, this project is written in all three .NET languages! (That list lacks C++/CLI and PowerShell, but they are not owned by the core .NET team).
This project is built on top of DellFanManagement by Aaron A. Kelley. That project uses the GPL 3 license, so this project is under the GPL 3 license as well.
To run this, you need .NET 8 and both the ASP.NET Core and Windows Desktop runtimes.
100% of the code in this project was written without the aid of GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and other random noise generators.