Fan Error

[mosherben]

Hi guys,
apologies for asking you for help during the festive period but I have a laptop fan problem which has come up, and I am going back to uni in a week.

I have a IBM r50 laptop, which until this afternoon was working fine. However, this afternoon everything seemed to crash it (running football manager 2007,loading firefox at startpage- google, and even logging into MSN). This must have happened about 10 times, but I wasn't really keeping track as I wasn't expecting this to turn into a major problem. Everytime it "crashed" on me, I had to remove it's battery and turn it on again; not even task manager would load and generally it wouldn't respond.

I tried turning it on, and the POST screen appeared for 5 mins, doing nothing and then a blank screen would show up saying fan error, and after a few seconds the laptop would power itself off. I've tried turning it on 5 times since it first happened and nothing has changed- does anyone have any ideas what to do?

Using warrenty is out of the question as it expired exactly a year ago so I will have to take it to a comp repair shop and hopefully get it fixed before I head back off into uni. Have I missed anything that I could try before going to a repair shop?

Cheers,
Ben

[Steve]

Sounds like an error with the fan

More specifically:

1. It's not spinning
2. It's not spinning quick enough
3. The sensor's broke

Not sure how easy the fan on that laptop is to get to, otherwise I'd know whether to advise you have a go at fixing it yourself.

[mosherben]

Hi steve,
cheers for the reply.

Had a look at it, and I've noticed 2 fins have broke. No ideas how this seems to have happened. Just thought about testing whether it was actually spinning or not- seems not to judging by putting my hand by the side where the air is exhausted from the laptop.

Fancy this happening on Xmas day..