A little help with replacing the fan assembly in a T43p?

[madboyv1]

Hello, I am new to these boards and hope to be able to receive a wealth of knowledge, as well as perhaps give some back, but in due time.

Among many other bad things that have happened to my computer in the last two weeks (external HDD failing and currently recovering, my primary HDD in my thinkpad physically failing), one of the blades on my fan had broken out and was shredded by the fan. The fan itself still works, but its very loud and vibrates a lot due to that it is no longer balanced. being that I had opened my computer before to upgrade the ram, I already knew that I needed a long fan assembly, So I bought another assembly to replace it.

However when I tried to take the fan off (as per the maintenance instructions) I found that I could not remove the fan from the GPU. It seems this rubber heat pad of some sort that I have heard of has grafted itself to it, and it seemed that more strength than I wanted to put onto it might have been required.

Any ideas on to help me get the fan assembly off of the GPU more easily? Also, would I need to replace this heatsink pad at all? I'll probably will have to replace the thermal paste because of the fan replacement, but I have some Arctic Silver 5 I can use for that. =)

[agarza]

Try inserting a plastic flat object between the GPU heatsink and the core of the GPU, do not scratch it. I think you could easily remove it applying pressure on left-right sides on the GPU heatsink
plate.

The thermal pad you're referring is the one that goes on the GPU heatsink plate?

[madboyv1]

I assume such. its a gray pad that seemed to not want to budge that is between the GPU and the fan/heatsink assembly.