check Task Manager if the process smartmenu.exe is running at 50% CPU after startup. This is a common cause of fan noise and heat. smartmenu is a badly behaved, buggy piece of code that is very sensitive to startup app load order and timing. When the latter are not according to its "taste" it keeps hogging the CPU, as if looking for something missing that it cannot execute and keeps the CPU running at 50% when Windows is idle, hence the early heat and fan noise on startup and thereafter. Killing the process stops this but you will lose smartmenu (when this 50% happens it is already non-functional in any case, I mean the middle lid button). You can reinstall it and if you are lucky it might hook/load at the correct moment without the above issues (= 0% CPU). HP should apply better quality assurance on those multimedia utilities that cyberlink create for its notebooks. They are all extremely buggy ever since the days of QuickPlay and now with SmartMedia.

Another utility that is sensitive to load order (though it doesn't cause high CPU load or heat when it goes wrong) is the Quick Launch Buttons - the mute button and the sound driver initialization must happen in a certain order for the button to work properly. Sometimes it works then you happen to install something totally unrelated, such as an updated video driver, that loads some other component at startup and Windows recomputes the boot sequence as a result (something end users cannot directly control) and the mute button goes nuts again the next time you boot. A dirty fix in such cases is to reinstall the sound driver (yes! :-), shut down the machine (better remove power/battery for a couple of minutes), then startup again. Mute button should now be working, but why all this headache?!!! Again HP should carefully revise its buggy utilities. P.S. The latest Windows 7-specific HP Quick Launch Buttons v6.50.4.2 dated August 2009 still does NOT fix this problem: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp44501-45000/sp44777.exe

Ha! I have the opposite problem. I cant find the fingerprint reader.

Hey wait, are the CPU or GPU swappable? I'm all for that.