X200 fan - sometimes strange grinding noise

[wisdomkeeper]

Recently, I bought Lenovo X200 - C2D P8600, INTEL 4500, 3GB RAM(132$) It was working about 3-4 months almost perfectly, also there were not many signs of use.
The last one or two weeks I have a problem with strange grinding noise, that starts almost randomly when the laptop is working. I thought that the radiator of the cooler was dirty, but it wasn't. Today, when I powered up the laptop, I saw error message on the screen with the text "FAN ERROR". I powered it down and tried to start up several times. One of these times i received "NV7 Checksum error". After several attempts and removing of the battery, the fan started to work like nothing was happened. Before that it was almost not operational, when I watched Xvid movie, the CPU temperature with almost no load was about 60 degrees. I couldn't feel the fan spinning.
I am asking for advice. I want to know why the grinding noise started with no apparent reason, then after some time(usage) the whole fan stopped and now everything is working like nothing was happened at all. I know that I have at least to pus some oil on the axis of the fan and that this means complete dissasembly. Because of the problem I was going to do this today. Before that I just wanted to try again. I noticed that now everything is almost back to normal, so I want to know is this a normal behavior for X200 series and does this mean that the cooler/fan of the laptop is just low quality and I am expecting too much?
I know that the fans on the IBM T4x/T6x are on magnetic pillow, so except the axis that keeps the rotating part in one place, there shouldn't be any significant friction.

[Qing Dao]

Install ThinkPad Fan Control (TPFC.63). That can give you full control over your fan if you are using Windows. If anything happens beyond that, it is probably a hardware issue with the fan which would require it to be fixed or replaced.