geeky blog: fixing my laptop part 1...

Since my trip to Washington DC my beloved Fujitsu P7010 laptop has been acting up. 

It resembles this one:

It was the bomb back in 2004 when I bought it.  3lbs, DVD drive, 4-5 hour battery life... now its getting old, the battery doesn't last more than 3 hours or so and the processor struggles.

But it was still quite usable until recently.  Two weeks ago the fan started making weird buzzing sounds. At first it would go away if you tapped on the case near the fan,  after a while it wouldn't stop at all.  Upon return to HK, now when I boot it up, the BIOS stops and says 'Fan Error!'  luckily you can bypass this stop to load up the OS.  The fan is still running, but it sounds like its really struggling.

Its ok when I'm at home, I have one of those cooling fan bases that helps keep it cool - in my case a clear plastic one with coolblue LEDs (here's a picture I took when I bought it last fall) :

OK, so as long as I keep the computer on top of this thing,  (and line it up so the fan blows directly on the processor area, which is the hottest), its still OK..  doesn't seem to overheat or crash or anything.  But the problem is I need to be able to bring this thing down to the office all the time... so dragging the plastic cooler and wasting USB power on it when I'm not plugged in seems like a waste.

I took it down to Wanchai computer city, but the A-hole at the laptop repair place wanted HK$150 just to tell me what was wrong with it (i already know!)  he even said he had to charge me $150 just to tell me how much the replacement fan costs! what a fu*ker!  I told him 'thats a joke! forget it!'

I tried calling Fujitsu's authorized service center in HK.  They were much nicer,  they said it was only HK$100 for the parts (US$12! a bargin!)  but HK$500 for the labor.  (not the end of the world, a lot better than it'd cost in the US or japan!).  But the problem is they need FIVE days to do the work.  damn,  not really an option! 

I asked them if they just sell the fan, they said they don't sell parts.... so I'm out of options, right? suddenly buying a new laptop started looking like my only realistic option...

But after poking around on the internet, I found out that its actually not /that/ hard to take these things apart.  I decided to give it a try:

Step one was remove the battery and optical drive, then remove the case screws on the bottom.

Step two is to flip it over and carefully pry the keyboard up and slide it out.  after that there's the grill below the screen between the hinges. this was the trickiest part, even once the screws are out there's still a snapping tab on both sides. 

After some fiddling i managed to get it off.  you're supposed to use a piece of plastic but i used a mini-screw driver and tried very hard to avoid scratching or bending anything (but its already on its death bed, so scratching the paint is not a big deal).

ah, there she is.  my wounded fan.  According to the net this is the most common thing to fail on these laptops, some people go through like one every 1 or 2 years.  So I'm lucky to have made it almost three years on one.  I got the part number and put everything back together.  Luckily it still worked!  (i did back up my drives first, don't worry!)

I did a search on google for the part #. It turns out that there's a store in Shenzhen that sells the replacementfor only 150rmb (~US$20)! score! this weekend i'm going to try Sham Shui Po, if its not there I'm going to have to make a run for the border! ;-)

Getting the laptop disassembled far enough to get the fan housing out is a bit more difficult,  hopefully everything works out. ;-)