14 DAY TRIAL // The Surface Pro 3 tablet, which is currently Microsoft’s most advanced tablet to date, is said to be suffering from overheating and excessive fan noise, according to some users, although this behavior hasn’t been confirmed for all units.
Lots of users complained on Microsoft’s Community forums about this problem and some have even tried to fix it on their own, as Redmond hasn’t provided too many details on what exactly is happening.
Some of those who purchased a Surface Pro 3 tablet looked into the processes running on their devices, explaining that the overheating and excessive fan noise is taking place at random times, no matter if you watch a YouTube video or playing a game.
User Step_001 claims that the problem is being caused by the Windows Installer Module and the Windows Installer Module Worker, which start in the background at random times and cause the CPU to work at bigger speeds. Hence the excessive noise from the fans that are trying to cool it down.
“There is an issue with Windows Installer Module and Windows Installer Module Worker. It will run in the background at intermitted times, sequestering a huge amount of CPU and memory power. This causes the system to overheat and increase fan activity,” the user wrote, emphasizing that it’s not a hardware problem.
“Additional damage(s) may occur, in my case MS SP3 would overheat causing the system to display a thermometer, shut down and burnout a few pixels. The software intermittently runs Windows Installer Module and Windows Installer Module Worker. I opened Task Manager, click on those 2 applications and End Task. Both the fan activity and heat would decrease significantly. I've been pressure testing this on my new MS SP3 for 8 hours.”
Other users have already confirmed that shutting down these processes fixes the temperature problem, but it’s not yet known whether this is just a temporary solution or it could work for everyone.
“I killed those processes when the fan took off without doing anything (just sitting at the desktop with no apps running). After killing them, the fan stopped sounding like a turbo fan and the back of the SP cooled quickly and significantly,” another user explained.
Of course, everybody expects a patch from Microsoft, but the company has remained really tightlipped this time. More information, however, could be provided next month as part of the Patch Tuesday cycle, when Microsoft is expected to release a new firmware update for the Surface Pro 3.