CPU Fan Constantly Running

So lately I started noticing that my CPU fan was constantly running, when your like me and work on your computer all the time this gets annoying fast. My initial thought was to attempt to control the fan manually, I already had cool and quiet enabled on my bios so I downloaded a third party application called SpeedFan. This is a free tool that allows you to manually control the speed of some of the fans in your case. The figure below gives you a feel for the software:

After playing around with some of the settings I set my fan to be at 85%, a rate that produced much less noise. The downside was the cpu temperature would slowly creep up to a point where the system would crash or the cpu would throttle itself. Throttling is when the CPU gets so hot that it just holds all processing for a second or two to cool down, a good short term solution that prevents thermal overload. So it was obvious that turning down the fan speed manually would not do the trick. Because the cpu was getting hot my only conclusion was that either the CPU heatsink was not properly set or that the thermal paste has broken down. After a little more research I discovered that the Core 2 Duo processor was also designed slightly convex which created its own set of problems as you can image.

The Operation

I purched some artic silver thermal paste from newegg and went to work taking apart my case. After taking off the heatsink, cleaning off the processor, applying a few drops of the termal paste, and resetting the heatsink, I powered on my computer. Early indications showed that my core temperature had dropped about 10c, and my fan problems were completely resolved. The conclusion is that if your fan is running constantly its probably a problem with how your heatsink is sitting or you may need new thermal paste. Good Luck all.