Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I've had my T61 (7658-CTO) for a year and a half now, and recently the fan has been louder than usual I think. It's not due to built-up dust as I've gutted the machine and cleaned it out with compressed air. Even when I'm using < 15% of my CPU and the fan is going at a slower RPM, I can hear it clearly. It's a little hard to describe - it doesn't sound like only air is nicely passing through, but it doesn't sound like it's hitting against anything too hard, although I would lean towards the latter description.

What should I do to fix this? I'm afraid that I only got the 1 yr warranty and that's expired. Is there some kind of setting that I can use to disable the fan completely except when I am using the CPU intensively?

I discovered tpfancontrol and boy am I a happy camper. It gives me all of the settings that I want (the Smart Mode won't even run the fan until the CPU hits 60 degrees).

The noisy fan is still a problem when it runs though. Is there some way I can manually restabilize it?

The fan on my T60p started making some unwelcome noises in September. As getting parts in Greece is very difficult, I decided to do open-heart surgery on the fan and pulled it apart and put some high-grade lubricating oil down the spindle hole. I put it all back together and it worked like a charm - until I got back to the UK and ordered a replacement (now I have a spare too!).

As long as you are careful, use high quality thermal grease (/compound) and spread it very thinly on top of the CPU, all will be fine.

This is a repair within even the most challenged of users' abilities.

Peter

peterh wrote:The fan on my T60p started making some unwelcome noises in September. As getting parts in Greece is very difficult, I decided to do open-heart surgery on the fan and pulled it apart and put some high-grade lubricating oil down the spindle hole. I put it all back together and it worked like a charm - until I got back to the UK and ordered a replacement (now I have a spare too!).

As long as you are careful, use high quality thermal grease (/compound) and spread it very thinly on top of the CPU, all will be fine.

This is a repair within even the most challenged of users' abilities.

Peter

You have to re-apply the thermal paste? That sucks. There is a good tutorial out there (one version in PDF) by arctic something , arctic silver or something, a company that makes thermal paste. The amount to use on a cpu in an r40 is about the size of a grain of rice, I specify the processor because I'm not sure if different processors have different surface areas....

The lubricating oil sounds like a good idea. I did reapply thermal grease (Artic Cooling MX-2, which supposedly is better than Arctic Silver 5) somewhat thinly and firmly screwed down the heat sink, but my computer still idles at 60 degrees or so. I've actually applied it 3 times at I always get the same temperatures so I think that this is just normal.

Would the open heart surgery work? My T61 have the same issue but I'm afraid of ruining the fan.