I turned on my HP Pavillion laptop last week, and was dismayed to see it boot to the following message screen:
The system has detected that a cooling fan is not operating correctly.
Continued operation is not recommended and may cause unpredictable behavior that could result in random shutdown, data loss or possible system damage. The system will shut down in 15 seconds. To prevent shutdown and continue operation, press the Enter key now.
System Fan (90b)
After a quick internet search (on a different computer), I discovered that there was a good chance that my fan was just clogged with dust. On the other hand, it might also have had something to do with that horrible crunching sound that I heard coming from the interior of my computer the day before...
| A laptop cooling fan. What is that crazy sound?! |
Either way, I figured that I might as well take the laptop apart and try to fix it myself before taking it in to the shop. After all, how hard could it be? I just need to remove the back, clean out the fan, and then see if that fixed the problem.
As it turns out, laptops are not quite as easy to take apart as desktops. I used this walkthrough to guide me through the disassembly process. It's not necessarily difficult as long as you have the right tools, but there are certainly a lot of steps, and a lot of screws to keep track of.
I used the following tools:
- Some small Phillips head screwdrivers
- A small flat blade screwdriver
- A guitar pick (medium thickness)
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| No wacky Apple tools required. |
Actually, I'm pretty sure all of the screws required the Phillips screwdriver. The guitar pick was to help pop open a few parts, including the outer casing. In the aforementioned walkthrough, a special tool is used to do this, but the guitar pick worked just fine. The flat blade screwdriver was just used for poking things.
The other thing I decided to do, was to keep track of everything that I removed from the laptop. I'm sure there are much better ways to do this, but I used a piece of printer paper. Every time I removed screws from a part of the laptop, I wrote down how many screws there were, and the rough location of where they came from. I also used a lettering system to track the order that I removed things, so that I could work backwards when I finished.
If I was worried about losing pieces, I might have put tape over each group of screws as I went along, but I had a large, clean work area, so I didn't bother. It turned out fine.
When I finally gained access to the fan, the first thing I discovered was a large number of plastic bits stuck inside the fan compartment! That explains the crazy sounds I was hearing.
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| These do not belong in a cooling fan. |
I also discovered that the fan was terribly dusty. I didn't have any compressed air, so I used a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachement. It did the job reasonably well, although I needed to do a little touch-up work with a paper towel.
After I put the whole thing back together, here's what happened:
1) The laptop wouldn't turn on. The Caps Lock button blinked on and off.
I opened the computer back up, moved the RAM from its original slot to the second (empty) slot, and tried again. This time around, the computer turned on. However...
2) The laptop still showed me the same error message that started this whole mess in the first place. I listened/felt for the fan to see if it was moving at all. It wasn't. I opened the whole laptop up again, and when I finally gained access to the fan, I realized that I had forgotten to plug it back in. Oops!!! I plugged it in, put everything back together, and tried again.
3) The laptop booted properly! Sort of. It actually went to the Windows screen, and stayed there, "thinking", for a ridiculously long time. This might have had something to do with the fact that I did a hard reset at some point in this process though, and eventually everything turned on as normal.
Problem solved!
| A Laptop |
Total Time: 1-2 hours (less if you've done it before, and if you remember to plug the fan back in)
Total Cost: $0
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