The compressed air trick was a hit-or-miss proposition, working about 50% of the time. Once the system was booted, it was fine though. The external fan also posed some hazard, and once or twice I bumped into the spinning blades as they whirred along on my desktop. Once I had everything off the ThinkPad, I set it on my workbench, not sure what I was going to do it with. Finally several weeks ago, I decided that since everything else about the machine seemed to actually work quite well, I would go ahead and replace the fan, and see if I can't get another year or two out of this puppy. Eventually, the display backlight will fail, or some other even more expensive component, at which point I will simply declare it dead and get a new laptop. But for now, I can squeeze a little more life out of it. It also has a feature that I really like, which is a parallel printer port, suitable for using the Xilinx Spartan-3 Development kit that I have. No other functional computer in the house as a parallel port anymore, and I'm leery of whether I could make the dev kit work with a USB base parallel port.
Now, it turns out that you can't just replace the fan in a ThinkPad. The fan is permanently riveted to the entire thermal module which serves as the heat sink for both the CPU and the graphics chip, and the heat exchanger that the fan blows air across.
Getting at the module is surprisingly easy. Just flip the ThinkPad over and remove the four keyboard screws and the eight wrist-pad screws. Then flip it back over, open it up, and lift out the keyboard and the wrist pad, disconnecting both of them from the motherboard as you go. Then there's just three more screws that hold the thermal module itself in, and the power connection for the fan. The entire disassembly only takes a few minutes. As always when working in a computer, make sure that the power is disconnected and the battery is removed. Also make sure that you are grounded and not providing static electricity shocks to the sensitive electronics. It may be a bit difficult to remove the module, because the thermal grease may have dried into a paste. Apply consistent force, and be aware that it may jerk loose when the grease lets go.
Once you have the module out, you may want to carefully clean around the area, and then insert the new module. Because the ThinkPad is pretty old, your "New" thermal module is likely to be a used or re-furbished model. That's what I ended up with, even though the vendor initially claimed it was "new". Make sure that you order the proper module for your machine. There will be a label with the FRU ("Field Replaceable Unit") number. For example, mine was 13R2657. I quickly discovered, however, that this FRU has been superseded by 41W5204. If the replacement module doesn't come with grease or thermal pads, make sure to add some where it was on the old module to get a good thermal connection to the chips. After all, a heat sink doesn't do any good if the heat can't get into it to begin with.
Once I got this machine back up and running, I discovered another interesting side effect of re-starting a windows PC that has been fallow for many months... There were TONS of updates needed. Windows XP, Firefox, Java, Adobe Flash, Antivirus, and several other apps all had pending updates to install, which brought the machine to a crawl. Then, with the new Antivirus profiles, it wanted to run a complete scan. So it took a couple of hours of mostly automated thrashing, but now it is as though I was never offline. I wonder how much longer this will last?
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