Through the troubleshooting process with the Dell team, we tried a few different things, and so far the most successful recommendation they made was to disable a feature called "Turbo Boost." They sent me this video explaining how to do it via the BIOS at startup and this video explaining how to do it within Windows. I chose to disable it via BIOS, and since then, the occurrences have dramatically decreased. Very rarely, however, it still occurs, which is fine for me, but just fair warning that it still may occur. Disable Turbo boost within BIOS Disable Turbo boost within Windows The sad thing about this solution is that it seems a bit like a copout. A Turbo Boost feature for when the machine truly needs it doesn't sound like a bad thing. But I suppose this machine rarely ever needs the fan to run so loudly and so quickly and at such a sudden increase in effort. I am never doing so much on it that that sort of behavior would be necessary, really, but to completely disable a built in feature simply because it's not behaving as expected seems wrong.Hope this info helps others.
The machine is new as of a few months, and has been exhibiting this issue since about a few weeks after I got it. I'm running a Dell Vostro 15 7510 with an 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11800H @ 2.30GHz 2.30 GHz and 16.0 GB of RAM. The issue will often flare up when I'm doing nothing at all resource intensive. Just working on a few things with a handful of apps open--on an average day, that would be Outlook, Teams, Chrome (with sometimes 3-7 tabs open), Microsoft SQL Management Studio, and Visual Studio 2013. The most resource-intensive app in that list is often surprisingly Chrome, but it sometimes happens without Chrome open and sometimes still persists when I close Chrome. In fact, it sometimes happens when the machine is meant to be asleep. I will put the machine to sleep, put the machine in my messenger bag, and then at midnight sometimes I will hear it suddenly shoot on in a rage from inside the bag. On rare occasion, however, closing some of the apps I have open or minimizing them for a moment and ceasing usage will seem to stop the fan from running high. This is precisely why this issue is so frustrating: because there is no consistency in the way that it manifests or the way it is treated. Perhaps more frustrating is that--when I run Task Manager (sometimes I even keep it running on another screen so I can dart my eyes over to the details to catch it red handed)--there is no smoking gun. None of the apps appear to be using an unreasonable amount of resources to warrant the fan to suddenly go from completely silent to jet engine level on a whim. The machine appears to be aware of the issue. I've used the out of box SupportAssist app to try and diagnose my machine, and it told me several times that I needed to update my BIOS in the section that checks for driver issues, and that there was a problem with my processor fan in the section that checks for hardware issues. For some time, the BIOS update was failing, but one fateful day, it succeeded, and I believed my issues were over. It was short-lived. The issue persisted, and SupportAssist no longer detects an existing issue with my fan. However sometimes, when putting my machine to sleep, or when waking up from sleep, or after an update, my machine will report that the fan did not behave properly during the boot process and will take me through steps that usually land me back at using the SupportAssist app for a scan, which will determine that there is no problem detected with my processor fan. I've also noticed that--when I use SupportAssist to perform a full scan--the issue is relieved for a while before it just inevitably occurs again later. Have no idea if there's a real correlation there. The machine is reasonably ventilated and elevated by design, and it is clean and is used in a clean environment. Please help.
Vostro 15 7510, loud fan noise randomly occurs