Laptop fan making grinding noises? Cheap and easy fix

I recently upgraded my laptop to use a Solid State Disk instead of a hard drive. This makes it very quick and very quiet, but also reduces the total count of moving parts to three;
a) the hinge for the display
b) the keyboard
c) the cooling fan
I don't close the display nor use the keyboard (have an external one) so there is only one moving part in the whole thing; the fan.

Last night my laptop started making horrible grinding noises, so I took it apart, blew out all the dust that had accumulated in the cooling section, and head straight for the only thing that could be making noise;

The fan in question is about 2" across;
http://www.notebook-doctor.com/popup_image.php?pID=2220300

..and from this website I find I can buy a new "thermal assembly" for .. $139. Nice.
This fan costs maybe 75 cents to make, and itself has only one single moving part; the spinning plastic fan blades, which are mounted on a metal shaft with a permanent magnet (there's a fixed set of electromagnets that make it spin). Ok so literally the only surface in the entire laptop that has any wear is where 5mm long metal shaft of the fan blades meets the fan housing, which sits in a minscule bearing; total size maybe 1mm square.

This, of course, was making the grinding noise; dust had got in there.

I cleaned it and put the tiniest drop of cooking oil on it, and now it's silent again. The whole machine should be good for another five years or 315360000000000000 CPU cycles until it needs another single droplet of oil.

If that worked for you, post a comment

Problem installing RIM COD modules on Blackberry 4.x and 5.0 using CodeModuleManager APIs - no permissions

There is a bug in the RIM Code Module Manager installation APIs that causes newly installed apps to have no permissions until the next reboot.

The suggested fix is to be working for a company that does around $100m a month of business with RIM; this worked wonderfully, and ensured my problem was fixed by developer support in no time.

Seriously? Ok the actual solution (found via above method) is to use some private RIM APIs for which you need special JAR goodness; contact dev support and ask them nicely about it.

Proper Symlinks in Vista+Win7 - who knew?

Well f'ing hell nobody told me that Windows had Got With The Program and introduced proper, real, honest-to-goodness Symlinks in NTFS nowadays.

use dos command: (console must be 'run as administrator', right-click that option when opening dos box or you get an error)

mklink

Works great; can symlink your shit all over the place, between drives, etc.


Yay!

I have to say that Win7 seems pretty good so far. Mind you, I had no great issues with Vista, apart from them removing 'telnet' ;-p

Note: mklink is somewhat braindead of course; you have to add \d if you want a link to a directory (why? can't it tell?), otherwise it simply creates you a link that.. doesn't do anything. Splendid work there ;-)

Error 1021 cannot create registry key when installing VMWare 7.0.1 on Win7

All sorts of stuff on the net about "set US locale" and "install with -L English" none of which worked for me.
I'd previously run VMWare off another disk without it being installed; it clearly created a registry entry which caused problems with subsequent install of full app.

Solution:
Use regedit to delete the key /HKLM/SOFTWARE/{Wow6432Node}/VMware,Inc.
You'll only have the Wow.. stuff if you're running on 64 bit.
Once this key is gone the installer worked (for me).

I did have it set in 'run as administrator' and 'run in vista compatibility mode' also, but I don't think that's what fixed it.