A friend of mine recently brought me their laptop to revive from the dead. It needed a new hard drive, more memory, Windows XP reinstall, and a new CPU fan. The first 3 items I took care of as soon as the parts arrived and had everything running great. I ordered the CPU fan off eBay which took quite some time to receive. (thanks USPS!) I had never replaced a CPU fan on a laptop before, so I consulted Dell’s service manual for further instructions. The removal of the CPU fan was pretty simple as it required just removing 2 screws and unplugging the power connector. However, to get to it you pretty much had to remove everything else in the laptop:

-Remove Battery
-Remove Memory
-Remove Hard Drive
-Remove Wireless card
-Remove Keyboard
-Remove Display
-Remove Palm Rest
-Remove Microprocessor Thermal-Cooling assembly

The first 4 items were simple to remove as all were located on the bottom of the system. I won’t go into great length on each step of the process, but it was very time consuming as I didn’t want to break anything. Once I got everything removed, I installed the new fan and carefully reassembled the laptop. I booted it up into Windows and ran my system fan utility which lets me control the speed of the fan. When I cranked it up to max speed, it made a horrendous noise. This wasn’t good as now I’d have to repeat the process and remove everything again. (doh!) Once I got to the fan, I removed it and compared it with the old fan. Everything looked the same except the new fan had a slightly higher top that the other. I’m guessing this was making contact with the bottom side of the keyboard or side of the case to make the horrendous noise. I decided to clean and oil the old fan to see if it would work again. I got a little lazy which almost ended up screwing up the whole system. I plugged the old fan back in and powered the system on without putting everything back together first. I wanted to see if the thing would spin up at all. It seemed to work fine, but the system decided to lock up on me while booting up. I figured at this point I’d go ahead and put everything back together and see if that fixed the problem.

I booted it up and got a bunch of errors on the screen. (good job Stan, good job…) It was spewing out numerous memory errors which lead me to believe I’d zapped one or both of my memory chips. To make matters worse, the screen was flickering and had static all over it. (oh holy crap!) Seeing this made me think I’d tightened a screw too tight and nicked the cable going to the display. I thought for sure I’d fried the system, but I didn’t panic and started troubleshooting. I took the system apart yet again and reseated the display connector and made sure I wasn’t squashing the cable. I also reseated both memory cards to see if that was the problem.

The moment of truth was now here as I powered up the system. The BIOS beeped at me telling me that the memory size had changed. (oh no) Luckily, it was a good thing as it was seeing both memory sticks this time. (whew!) I booted up into Windows and the display was normal again. (double whew!)  I tested the fan with my program and it powered up to full speed with no problem and no loud noise. Not wanting to push my luck anymore, I called it a success and packed it away in the case.

It was a good learning experience for me as I’d never gone that deep into a laptop before. Thanks to Dell for providing a service manual on their website, I couldn’t have done it without them. (well I probably could have but would have broken something for sure)