Well, no longer; I replaced the fan on Saturday and the T60 is now running just fine, and quietly. :-) Nearly all of the help and advice I received on this list was useful in the process, and I thought I'd report on some of the steps that gave me pause (keep in mind that I have very little hardware maintenance experience).
As someone on this list suggested, the fan assembly delivered from Lenovo already had thermal compound (in a matrix of dots) at the location which is over the CPU, so I never did need to apply any. In my T60's configuration, the GPU and the northbridge chips are discrete. When I removed the old fan and exposed them, there appeared to be some thin gunk on the top of each. While instructions about cleaning the surface of the CPU with alcohol were clear, I could find no mention of these other chips. There appeared to be no thermal compound involved, and the fan assembly has two "thermal pads" which press on them, so I neither cleaned the chips nor applied thermal compound before installing the new fan assembly. I was stopped for a while at one point, because it appeared that the two thermal pads on the new fan assembly shipped with thin plastic covers. I assumed they were to be removed, but I browsed the web for a while first, looking for any help. I eventually found a remark about this in a forum (somewhere), and tweezers made quick work of removing them. My only other issue is that the HMM has absolutely no description of the points above. I suppose a hardware maintenance type would need only to know which screws to remove and the order in which to reinstall them, and maybe I'm asking too much. Still, a few comments would have made this go a lot faster. I should also mention that in my browsing I ran across a number of comments to the effect that T60 noise - and eventual failure - is quite common. Still, mine lasted over five years of 24-hour operation, so I probably shouldn't complain. Thanks to everyone on the list who made comments and suggestions. You convinced me that I could do this, and it turns out you were right. A quiet T60 was a nice Christmas present, and while it's time to replace it (it's out of warranty, and something else will go wrong), this means I don't have to be rushed. Mike Michael Stack http://www.kcats.org "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five" Marx _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
