Grinding fan noise on old T40 -- when will the fan fail?

Message

SteveDC · #1 Post by **SteveDC** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 7:20 am

The fan on my 3-year old T40 has started making a low-level grinding, scraping, rattling sound when it runs. Kind of like the water pump on your car before it goes out.

It seems I can get a new fan from tech support and replace it myself. But it comes at an extremely inconvenient time of travel for me in my small business.

My question is: How much time before it fails completely? Hours? Days?

One thing I have done is create a power profile where the CPU speed is "Very Low". For most of my work (word processing) it is fast enough and the fan does not run at all.

Thank you for considering my question!

cmarti · #2 Post by **cmarti** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 7:30 am

It may take months for the fan to completely stop working, you may consider get a replacement now just to be covered.

#3 Post by **underclocker** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:43 am

You can also try cleaning it out, sometimes the dust and grime builds up to cause excessive friction.

SteveDC · #4 Post by **SteveDC** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:09 pm

Cleaning helped. I blew some compressed air into the air outlet and a lot of crud blew out the four holes above the audio jacks. The noise stopped about 15 minutes later. When I get home, I may pull the fan assembly to try to clean it better, but the procedure in the repair manual makes me a little nervous (separating the fan assembly from the CPU).

Thanks a lot for the great tips. You all may have saved my road trip!

#5 Post by **daeojkim** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 6:21 pm

I never thought it was a good idea to blow air "into" the vent. The dust will go into the computer.

Besides disassembling the fan unit, the next best thing seem to be to remove te keyboard and blow compressed air outwards from the fan so that the dust is moved out of the computer through the vent.

When you do this, however, make sure to hold the center of the fan with your finger so that the compressed air does not spin the fan too fast, which can cause damage.

#6 Post by **underclocker** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:05 pm

daeojkim is correct - blowing from the inside out is best. This is acutally what I was thinking, but forgot that not everyone takes apart their ThinkPads regularly.

It's only a four screws to remove the keyboard and get direct access to the fan.

Grinding fan noise on old T40 -- when will the fan fail?

Grinding fan noise on old T40 -- when will the fan fail?

Who is online