Digital Tangent

So about a month or so ago, the CPU fan in my HP Pavilion laptop started to go on the fritz. I'm pretty sure a ball bearing broke or something similar, because now when the fan reaches a certain speed, it vibrates violently and sounds like a chainsaw, and doesn't move very much air. Obviously, This sucks on quite a number of levels.

So this afternoon, between classes, I finally got fed up with it and decided to crack the case open. Summary of the disassembly process: holy crap modern laptops are complex. My old thinkpad only needs to have about 8 screws removed to disassemble the whole thing. The HP has to be taken apart in multiple stages: remove all the screws from the outside of the chassis, remove the keyboard, remove all the screws from under the keyboard, pry the two halves of the chassis apart, then remove all the screws holding the motherboard in place, and do all this while unplugging ribbon cables and moving other parts out of the way. Disassembly here took a good half hour to liberate the motherboard.

Then I removed and disassembled the whole heatsink/fan dealie, and determined that it's just royally fuxx0red and can't be repaired. The thing's just shot, plain and simple. So I went on HP's part ordering website and purchased a new assembly at the kinda crazy price of fifty dollars. Yes, fifty dollars for a fairly crappy fan, a piece of molded plastic/metal, and presumably a small copper heatsink.

So now I wait. Hopefully within 5 days or so I'll be reversing this whole process with a fan that works more like an actual fan and less like a buzzsaw.

Oh, and I took photos of the process; they're in this album.

_WRF