What is DisplayFusionSettings.exe and why does it hate my fan?

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deanis

256 discussion posts

For months, I've had a constant pattern from my laptop's fan. Every 5 or 10 seconds, it revs up for 2-3 seconds. After a while, I start to feel like I'm on a boat due to the consistent waves.

Today I tried yet again to figure out what was causing this. I used Task Manager and sorted by Page Fault Delta. Right around the time of every fan "wave", I saw DisplayFusionSettings.exe appear right at the top of the list, with around 24,000 page faults. Then the process disappears from the list, meaning it stopped.

Armed with that nugget, I renamed DisplayFusionSettings.exe to .ex_, and now my fan is (finally!) quiet again!

So, what is this app, why does it run every few seconds, and why does it hate my fan so much? I suspect the last question may be related to the huge number of page faults.

Mar 5, 2015 • #1

DisplayFusionSettings.exe runs the Settings window, but also handles the wallpaper generation and application. Do you have your wallpapers set to random, every few seconds?

Mar 6, 2015 • #2

deanis

256 discussion posts

I don't think so. I don't even know where to check that.

Mar 6, 2015 • #3

deanis

256 discussion posts

In the debug info, both monitors are set to:

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Image Mode: MyComputer
Image Random: False

Mar 6, 2015 • #4

Ok, that's really weird! It shouldn't be starting up unless you open the settings window, or it's changing the wallpaper. Could you send a debug log? Here are the steps:

On the Troubleshooting tab, change the Logging drop-down to "L1: Log Minimal"
Restart DisplayFusion
Reproduce the issue and note the time so we'll know where to check in the log file
Send us the DisplayFusion.log and DebugInfo.html files (can be found by clicking the Open Log button on the Troubleshooting tab)
Disable debug logging after sending the log

Mar 6, 2015 • #5

deanis

256 discussion posts

Here you go. It happened three times within the span of a minute, which is all I had logging enabled for.

• Attachment [protected]: DebugInfo.html [160,620 bytes]

• Attachment [protected]: DisplayFusion.log [205,467 bytes]

Mar 9, 2015 (modified Mar 9, 2015) • #6

In the DisplayFusion Desktop Wallpaper configuration window, can you click the "Wallpaper Settings" button and see if the two options shown in the attached screenshot are enabled? If they are, could you try disabling them?

• Attachment: Wallpaper Auto-Fix.jpg [231,208 bytes]

Wallpaper Auto-Fix.jpg

Mar 9, 2015 • #7

deanis

256 discussion posts

They were set for one of my monitors. I unchecked them and the cycling Settings.exe seems to have stopped. Odd that it was doing that every few seconds.

Mar 10, 2015 • #8

Yeah, there's a bug there for sure. Glad to hear that fixed up the issue for now. I've added this to our list too, so we can try and figure out the root cause