Is there any practical way to reduce the noise of the Elitebook G7 fan? My work computer is brand new and the fan noise is getting pretty annoying, compared with the surface laptop 2 that was much much quieter doing similar work. I rarely if ever heard the Surface fan, but I wasn't doing as much CPU intensive work when I had it. When it did spin up it was much, much quieter. I changed from a Surface to Elitebook because the Surface WiFi was a bit rubbish, but I used USB ethernet most of the time anyway.

The HP fan spins up whenever I do more than very light web browsing. Doing things like building docker containers or even a basic build the fan spins up almost immediately, and fan speed changing constantly which is worse than staying on high and at a set speed. 

I find it's slightly better with the laptop open than closed - I don't use the screen, I use an external monitor. I have it sitting on top of my home PC, a hard surface, so airflow is probably pretty good.

Is there any way to configure it to be quieter? Is there likely something wrong with it, or is this normal for the probook? My next approach will be to buy a 5+m long USB-C extension cable and put it in another room.