DM4 fan always on BIOS setting, and general noise

Hey everyone. My sister just got a DM4 from Future Shop, and the first thing we noticed was that it was loud under low load conditions. A quick trip to google showed me how to go into its BIOS and disable the "fan always on" setting, but it didn't say why that was enabled by default. Most laptops don't constantly have their fans on, so there shouldn't be any problems with turning it off, right? Do you have yours always on or not?







Also, even with that setting turned to disabled, the hard drive produces quite a bit of noise without the fan. Is that normal? I know its a 7200RPM drive so its bound to be a bit louder than my 5400RPM drive, but is yours as loud when seeking and also at idle? Sounds like a constant woosh at idle, and the normal crunching when seeking, and both are very noticeable. The more laptops I get experiences with, the more I get amazed by how quiet modern Macbook(pro's) are in comparison, heh.





And while I'm asking stuff, which pieces of pre-installed software are bloatware and what is actually useful? The startup time seems slow for a laptop with components this fast, even the laptop in my sig starts up faster despite having a much slower processor and slower hard drive, so I think there's a fair bit of bloatware on the HP.



Thanks