On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:28:09 -0500, richard <[email protected]> wrote: >The fan on my x61s has been noisy, so I opened the machine and blew on >the fan. When I reassembled and tried to boot, I got a grinding noise >from the fan and it stopped with the message "fan error." After a few >tries, I hit escape on the error message and it booted. Trying again, >it booted normally. > >How best to proceed? Might this be a transitory problem?
It seems most likely that you moved some dust around so that it was obstructing the fan more than before. With luck you will find that it moves out of the way of the fan again - although I have had to replace fans in the past after trying to clean them because they were noisy! As they are the same generation of machine, I wonder if your X61s has the same design as my T61? The fan in there has always been noisy, although the level of noise varies. I had the fan replaced while the machine was still under warranty, but the noise returned within a few days. I didn't bother to send it in again, as it meant being without my laptop for several days and had cost almost as much in courier charges as a replacement fan costs on eBay. It seems to me that the heatsink/fan arrangement on the T61 is a really poor design. I have noticed that the fan noise varies if I flex that corner of the laptop. This week I took the laptop apart to see if I could do anything about the noise, and it seems fairly apparent why this is the case. The metal of the heatsink is extremely thin above the fan and is pretty well touching it. The heatsink could easily be bent by slightly clumsy installation or excessive flexing of the laptop case, and it wouldn't take much before it would be constantly pressing on the fan, probably enough to stop it turning. Another very poor design feature is that to clean the fan you have to remove the heatsink/fan assembly from the laptop - not something I'd want to do too often, particularly because you need to have thermal paste to hand before reassembly. My laptop is running so much cooler now that I have removed all the dust that had built up between the fan and the grille - but I'm thinking at the moment that I will try and change my laptop before I next need to do so. Unusually for a Thinkpad, I wouldn't feel able to hand it down to family or friends with the noise it constantly makes and the need to perform that disassembly. I'm surprised I haven't heard this complaint more often. Is my T61 really unusually noisy? Seems unlikely to me, given the aforementioned flimsiness of the heatsink. David _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
