fan, cooling fan, heatsink or any other word?

[Dimitri_P]

doing a small market research.

If you were to look for a fan for your particular thinkpad model;

besides model number and/or exact fru; what words would you use to search with?

-fan
-cooling fan
-cooler
-heatsink
any combination of these or any other words?

I'm mostly interested if people use "heatsink"; I don't

-D.

[killer]

Now, without being a scientist my understanding is ...

A heatsink is very different from a fan. A fan either blows cool air onto a hot object or draws heat away. A heatsink is an object with an abnormally large surface area so that heat dissipates through radiation.

No doubt a scientist will be along shortly to either shoot me down or applaud my simplistic, lay approach to the subject.

Whatever ...

[Harryc]

I don't understand the difficulty in searching for a fan. Use the Lenovo parts manuals online based on the machine type/model...and yes Lenovo calls them fans, even though there is a heatsink attached.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... yle=lenovo

[Dimitri_P]

I also search by part No.

but the question is, if not by part number, what words would somebody use.

and whether you particularly would use word "heatsink" versus others?

[Harryc]

If you are talkng about a search engine like google, I'd still use 'fan', because that is what Lenovo and IBM before them called the entire assembly.
Same deal on EBay ... although it seems many sellers use 'heatsink fan'.
http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid ... Categories

[Dimitri_P]

>>although it seems many sellers use 'heatsink fan'.

that's my point if buyers don't searc by "heatsink" while sellers use "heatsink" - wouldn't it be a waste of keywords?

going back to original question - would does anybody use heatsink, cooler or cooling, while searching for that?

[Harryc]

Well, in EBay terms, lets look at this pragmatically. If you search for 'Thinkpad fan' right now on EBay you will get 257 hits. If you search for 'Thinkpad Heatsink fan' you will get 155 hits. If you search for 'Thinkpad heatsink' you will get 163 hits. If you search for 'Thinkpad cooling' you will get 55 hits. So, the smart money says to put 'Thinkpad Heatsink Fan cooling' in your auction title. I still say most EBayers are going to search for 'T42 fan' if they need one. In fact that search turns up a couple of your auctions. Where did you get that hideous green cloth from anyway?

[rkawakami]

Since I'm assuming that you are trying to get the most out of eBay's fairly limited allowance of characters for an auction title, this is a suggestion:

IBM Thinkpad XXXX NNLNNNN Fan Assembly

XXXX = system type, like A31p
NNLNNNN = FRU number

That's 39 characters (including a trailing space), leaving you with 16 left over. That can be used with optional terms such as "guaranteed" or "original" or expand on system type like "T40 T41 T42". I would not include "heatsink" in the title even though it appears that many other sellers use that term, unless you are willing to give up on the optional adjectives. I would include "assembly" as that is part of the official IBM description. Putting both "IBM" and "Thinkpad" is useful since searchers may type either one when describing what system they have. eBay certainly doesn't make it easy with a 55 character limitation for auction titles . On a recent search for a fan for an A31p, I just used the FRU since I was looking for a particular version. I also used the optional "search in description" as well.

[Dimitri_P]

Where did you get that hideous green cloth from anyway?

Oh, come on

[Harryc]

LOL...

[TheRedFox]

yeah, I think fan would be more likely in my search. but I think that rkawakami has the best idea.