How to replace a heat sink fan in a T60p

[creed]

My heat sink fan recently went out so I set it out to replace it. My Thinkpad T60p model is 2623-8YU, specifically a 14.1" with 1400x1050 resolution and ATI FireGL V5250 graphics chip. The fan part# needed is 41V9932 and you can find them on ebay for around $20 refurbished or $40 brand new.

Start out by taking out the battery and removing the screws circled here:

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Now carefully flip over the laptop and remove the keyboard palm rest panel:

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Remove the fingerprint reader and mouse connectors by pulling on the white tab circled here:

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Now carefully push up the keyboard to expose the connector. Pull on that tab to remove the keyboard:

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You will see exposed, among other components, the copper heat sink fan. To gain access to it, we need to remove the top border panel (sorry I don't know the exact name of this part). Remove the two screws shown here and guide the gray and blue wires around the clip:

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Now remove the top border panel. It clicks into place at certain locations so you'll have to nudge it out carefully:

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Remove these two screws:

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Now remove these three screws:

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Carefully loosen the fan as shown. It is still attached so you'll have to unplug it at the arrow shown here:

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That's it! The fan should now be removed. You'll notice some thermal paste on the cpu core and probably the GPU cores. Clean these up with isopropyl alcohol and Q-tips:

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This is the fan part number you need. I initially got the wrong fan replacement for my T60p and the GPU cores were not properly cooled. Laptop overheated and shut down after a few minutes. The one you need is 41V9932 (if you have the same T60p as me). Make sure your fan has these two copper shields for the two cores:

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Once the cores are cleaned up, you will need to reapply thermal paste on just the cpu core (if your fan already didn't come with thermal gum for the GPU shields). If there is no gum at all on the fan's GPU copper shields, you will need to apply thermal paste on all three cores. Just a little bit of paste is needed. Use a credit card to smoothly apply the paste all across the cores:

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Now plug the fan back in and rescrew it in. Put the laptop back together in reverse order and you should be good to go:

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I've had the new fan in for two weeks now and it works great. Hope this will help out others.

[Harryc]

We do not allow inline pics without a warning in the subject line, and then only one small pic is allowed. Please read the forum rules. - breaking .img tags.

[creed]

I just read the rules. Sorry for posting too many pics.

[Harryc]

No problem, thanks. If you edit your post and remove the img tags at least people will be able to click on the pic links. Nice job on the write-up by the way. Thanks for sharing.