The surgery was a success. I have replaced the Thinkpad's fan.

[elfs]

Well, that was non-traumatic. It took 38 minutes to replace the fan on my laptop and was much easier the second time. Note to self: when replacing the fan, you do not need to disassemble the whole speaker assembly. Just remove the left speaker and leave it off to the side. Don't even bother removing the tape. Only the speaker, not the wires, covers the fan. I even had some arctic silver, so that worked well (although I always fret about whether I put on too little or too much).

I ran Chrome with some high-performance canvas demos in one window, and Quake 2 in another, and got the temperature above 50C. The fan is nice and quiet, as it should be.

Admittedly, 38 minutes was the time it took to crack the case, replace the fan and re-assemble. That was after backing up the hard-drive. But I do backups fairly regularly, so the backup only took about 20 minutes.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

You need just enough thermal paste to actually cover the mating surface. If you can see through it, you've spread it too thin, but just a skosh more than that will do fine. Any more will just squish out.