T21 Fan

[virtualroot]

hello!, i have a problem with my notebook, thinkpad T21, when i turn on, the fan works whell for a few seconds and stop. any idea?

later the system overhead and shut down.

Thanks

[vanaya]

Welcome to the forum!!

Have you received any fan errors? One of the steps in POST in to check whether than fan is attached and will spin up to test. If you have not received any fan errors, I believe the POST test acknowledges that there is a working fan connected. This does sound like the an overheating problem. Maybe dried thermal paste. Have you peeked inside the vents to see if there is dust clogging the path? My first recommendation would be to take a peek "under the hood" and look for dust and do some spring cleaning. Then I would freshen up the thermal paste between the fan and CPU. You can look for the Hardware Maintenance Manual to help you with disassembly.

[virtualroot]

I replace the fan with another and the problem persists

fan works for a seconds and stop

[Harryc]

Try running PC-Doctor on that machine. It should have some fan tests.

[Chris Doran]

This sounds like one of the more common failure modes of the T series. I have a machine with this problem which I haven't yet tried to fix, but web searching finds various possible solutions:-

• Remake the solder connections to the inductors and any other joints you can do without risk of creating a solder bridge -- see the "Pulsing Fan on a Dead T23..." sticky thread.

• Reflash/update the BIOS (dangerous if the machine may halt while you're doing it). Later BIOS versions are said to have better fan control, but if your machine has only just started doing this, it's probably a hardware problem.

• Remove/reseat the mini-PCI card, fan/CPU, and/or memory.

From reports elsewhere, it seems that a permanent fix is not guaranteed. Any of the above will often appear to fix it, but if you are unlucky the problem comes back days or maybe weeks later.