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Overview

After what has been several months since my last post i figure I should update this. I'm going to cover just a few personal projects, and cnc updates in a somewhat chronological order. There is a lot i did on my internship, which i cannot disclose due to a proprietary nature. Rest assured it was cool stuff! Thanks pcc!

Laptop Fan Repair

To kick things off. I'll cover a simple laptop repair I

performed on my dad's laptop. I normally wouldn't post this as I find computer construction quite trivial, and just about anyone can build a computer these days. I can't count how many PC's I've built. I posted this because it's a laptop. Normally I don't touch them due to the ability to void a warranty.

In this case the laptop is so old there is no warranty to void anymore. My dad thought his computer was getting slow. We did a burn and format, and still noted slow performance. This is when I suspected hardware. I discovered the CPU fan wasn't spinning (or i surmised as there was no airflow or sound.) My dad also confirmed this as it was making very bad sounds, then stopped. I dug up a service manual from much scouring of the internet on how to dissasemble this beast.

What you see below is the major components removed on the left, and the remaining motherboard. After finding the interesting heat/pipe system they had installed i successfully removed the fan, after bending many plastic parts per-the manual's instructions. I looked up the part number, and sourced it from HP for about 50$. Found it on ebay for 11$ new. Purchased and installed it after a week's wait.

I then configured the bios to leave the fan explicitly on, instead of throttling per cpu usage. Computer ran like a champ after that!