Justin Acuff's Blog » cooling fan http://www.justinacuff.net Photography, Christianity, the Outdoors, or Whatever Else I Feel Like Writing Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:42:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Don’t Try This At Home http://www.justinacuff.net/2007/11/15/dont-try-this-at-home http://www.justinacuff.net/2007/11/15/dont-try-this-at-home#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:31:29 +0000 Justin http://www.justinacuff.net/2007/11/15/dont-try-this-at-home Continue reading →]]> And please, don’t ask me to try it for you either. For a while now, I have noticed that my laptop has been getting really hot after it runs for a while and starts to really slow down. So for the past couple of days, I’ve been monitoring the main cooling fan and noticed that it wasn’t ever coming on. The first thing I tried was using a little bit of the compressed air. That didn’t help at all. Even while it was blowing, the fan wouldn’t rotate. I booted into the Dell Diagnostics to run the test for the cooling fan. Sure enough, it gave an error that the fan wasn’t spinning. I wrote done the error codes just in case I had to call Dell. I’ve found that if I can give the results of the various troubleshooting steps that will probably ask you to go through, I can save a lot of time of being on the phone with them.

Laptop Completely Taken ApartAfter my last experience with a Dell Contracted Technician working on my laptop, I decided to take my computer apart to get to the fan. Unfortunately, to get to the fan, I pretty much had to take my computer completely apart. Again, I don’t recommend this. Laptop parts are very fragile and are often held together by a hidden screw, so if you try to open it, don’t force anything. After a good 10 minutes or so, I was finally to the fan. I first checked to see that its cable looked good and was plugged in. Although the last guy should have never gotten to this step in disassembly, I almost expected that he did and forgot to plug the fan back up. When I took the fan top off, I found the source of the problem… a big ball of dust. I wonder just how many other people have run into this problem that has a fairly simple solution.

Dust Ball

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