ThinkPad T42 fan replacement near Guernsey, WY 82214?

[Johan]

Fellow ThinkPad'ers in the USA:

A very dear female forum-friend near Guernsey, WY 82214 (location on a map shown here), needs to have a fan replaced in a T42, and by this post I'd kindly like to ask for recommendation(s) of who might be capable of performing such service at a fair cost, preferably someone who is not living too far away from WY, in order to keep shipping cost forth and back down. The idea is to ship the T42 in question (preferably without battery, power supply or CD-ROM, to keep the weight and hence shipping cost down) to someone with sufficient hardware replacement expereince, and then have the fan replaced, the T42 tested and shipped back. We/she will deliver a new fan.

Thanks very much in advance for any suggestions/recommendations.

Johan

[Harryc]

Johan, I can do it but I am not close. If she wants to pay USPS Priority Mail flat rate both ways that might be an option. It is $11 each way in a medium flat rate box.

[RealBlackStuff]

Harryc is an experienced IBM technician, the laptop would be in very good hands there.
Shipping rates are the same throughout the USA, so distance is (relatively) unimportant.

[Johan]

I can do it but I am not close. If she wants to pay USPS Priority Mail flat rate both ways that might be an option. It is $11 each way in a medium flat rate box.

Thanks very much for your kind offer and willingness to help, Harry; much appreciated! I take it that you also (like what I do!), certainly wish to keep especially our few female forum members both happy and pleased to be a part of this international outstanding friendly ThinkPad community!

As you may perhaps already have seen elsewhere, this particular female member is a woman with a truly impressive wide range of capabilities (I'll almost loose my breath if just trying to briefly summarize!), so before I got going at all, Sharie had opened the T42 in question, had dismounted the old (noisy) fan, and shortly after told me that she's actually willing to mount a new fan herself - whereby my above request for help is no longer valid. Thank you so much for your kind offer, in any case, Harry.

The replacement fan hence ordered is this (which was bought for $28.50 with an additional $3 to cover domestic shipping) but is slightly spooky in two respects:

1) The listing state "Compatible Part Numbers: 13N5442 & 41W5204"... but what does "compatible" mean here, I'm asking myself; if it is a TRUE, genuine IBM part, then this "compatibility" is not relevant to mention?? I'm getting a sense of this being a chinese-copy thing (??) - like all the many chinese parts sold on eBay and listed as being "compatible with" etc., but we'll see about that.

2) It is being delivered with a small tube of "Free Thermal Paste" ("free"? I have of course paid for it!) which is strange, because a genuine IBM part (see e.g. the leftmost, enlarged view image here) has the thermal compound already dispensed by IBM....?!

Anyway, bottom line is that this fan replacement project is hopefully possible to successfully fix by Sharie herself. Hey, Harry, how many women do you know who would fix her own laptop fan?!

Thanks, again, both of you.

Johan

[Harryc]

Johan, thanks for the reply. Good luck to you and Sharie with the fan replacement. I have seen a couple of female members over the years who are willing to get into manual laptop repair. Very impressive. I have purchased what have been describd as new compatible Thinkpad heatsinks on EBay recently for T60's, and while they looked new it was obvious the original quality was just not there. So you can't really tell until you see it. I have recently adopted the policy of replacing just the fans....works out well.