Defeating the fan of noise

[shermarama]

I have defeated the noisy fan bearing of irritation! Using only:

• A replacement fan (but not heatsink) unit, £13 from Hong Kong off of ebay
• A hardware manual from the Lenovo website
• A couple of small screwdrivers
• A useful forum to work out what the hell to do about one end of the heatsink being very firmly stuck to something
• A Stanley blade and some dental floss to remove the semi-fused heat transfer pad from the top of the GPU
• Plasters to stem the flow of blood from the gash in my thumb from applying too much force to even the blunt side of a Stanley blade
• A half-round second-cut file and a needle file to file off the folded-over tabs holding the fan unit to the heatsink
• Pliers to attempt to fold over the tabs on the new fan unit, although that mainly seemed to snap them off and the compact layout of everything suggests they're not needed once the unit's in place

And, now everything's back together and I've stopped bleeding, my fan no longer sounds like a didgeridoo full of gravel, my laptop's running at 5 - 10 °C cooler than the general background it's been running at recently and hasn't got anywhere within 20°C of the scary numbers it had been reaching during peak loads. Hooray for fixing stuff. 

Comments

[toby-on-tour.livejournal.com]

Whenever you defeat a tech gremlin they demand payment in blood.