Bad Fan on T40

Hi,

I have an IBM T40 which started making a clickity noise a few weeks ago which I thought indicated that the hard drive was failing. All of the sudden today the noise got much, much louder and I finally just turned the machine off essentially figuring that that was all she wrote. A few hours later I relaized that there was one last piece of data on the machine I'd like to have so I figured I'd try to boot it up one last time. When I did this what I got was a "fan error." I could easily imagine that the noise I was hearing was a bad fan rather than the hard drive.

Assuming this is the case, how hard is it to change a fan on one of these machines? How much would a fan cost? Where could I buy one? I've been googling around a bit but I can't really find any useful information. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-ts1971

 

Replacement fans are pretty cheap: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=t40+fan&category0=

Download the hardware maintenance manual for T4x series here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-46464

(Page go to 107 of that pdf file for removing fan assembly)

I removed the heatsink on my T60, it was pretty easy.

 

Thanks nyu3, those links are very helpful; maybe I'll take a shot at it. It's not clear to me whether I need the short fan assembly or the long, but maybe once I've taken the machine apart it will just somehow be obvious. Thanks again.

-ts1971