Laptop has become very noisy

Peewi

I own a laptop. To be specific, I own an HP Pavilion dv5124eu. Yesterday the fan started making a terrible noise whenever it was running. Thinking that I might be able to fix the problem myself, I opened up my laptop with the help of this manual that I found on HP's website.

While I did remove a rather large amount of dust from the inside of my laptop, I did not manage to fix whatever is causing the sound. Note that I didn't actually remove the fan from the mother board to inspect it closely, since I wasn't sure that I would be able to reattach it.

So, does anyone have any ideas on how to make a very noisy fan less noisy?

ginguskahn

Does it sound like the fan is running really really fast? (making a noise like a plane taking off :P) Is it possible you have a program eating the cpu in the background causing it to heat up and thus the fan run 100% all the time?

If you open task manager you can check what programs are using what cpu time, if anything other than "system idle process" is using up lots, you may have a problem, try killing that task if so.

Is it more of a rattle/clicking sort of sound? The bearing in the fan may be dry or on its way out, you can try getting a little bit of wd40 or grease on it but you will need to turn the fan over (remove it).

Lastly even though you got alot of dust out, I often find in laptops big clumps of dust build up between the exit of the fan exhaust and the hole in the side of the case that allows the air to pass through. these usually have bars on them that eventually clog solid with clumps, again you will probably need to remove the fan housing (the whole black plastic doodad) to get at it.

Peewi

It is more of a rattle/clicking sound. I'll try to look into greasing it, but the manual that I linked says that in order to remove the fan, you need to remove the heat sink, which apparently needs thermal paste the reattach.

ginguskahn

I see what you mean by the manual showing that whole area coming out together on page 5-70. Normally (I mainly work on fujis and acers here) there are 2 or 3 tiny tiny screws that hold the black plastic of the fan and shroud to the board and these can be removed, allowing just the plastic parts to be flipped over (the fan shroud is usually taped to the case to ensure all the hot air is pushed out of the case, you should not need to pull this off), thus not requiring the heatsink to be removed at all.

I can't vouch for that working on a HP, its been a while since I pulled one apart, you would have to judge for yourself if u can see the screws or not. From the image in the manual it all looks very similar however.