Laptop fan grinding noise?

Hi all,

My laptop fan is making some pretty weird noises and some of them sound pretty bad; when the laptop turns off the fan kind of clunkclunkclunks to a stop and I'm worried that the fan might not be spinning fast enough to cool the laptop. I've looked at how to replace the fan and it involves taking pretty much the entire laptop apart, is there anything else I could/should be looking at, trying to do, etc, before I go all in? The only thing I can think of would be to get a can of compressed air and try to give it a blast and maybe dislodge something; I just thought it would be worth asking before going through the trouble of taking the laptop apart plus the expense of buying a new fan. My laptop is an HP pavillion dv7.

Thanks a bunch for any help,
J

 

It might be an idea to get a program such as Speccy (Google it) and check the temps on your CPU, if the CPU is too hot, i would see if you could get access to the fan, clean and clean it out with a can of compressed air (Or a vacuum but that may damage components, i wouldn't recommend it but i do it personally) and if that doesn't help take the fan off and use an alcohol wipe to clean off the grey compound on it and replace it with some fresh thermal compound (There are plenty of youtube videos on how to do this).

 

If you can go to the HP support site and download and print the service manual, it will be a great help to have that manual in front of you if you decide to replace the CPU cooling fan.

I had to replace the system board in my Dell laptop because of USB issues. But while I had the laptop apart, I found that I had all sorts of nasty stuff inside the fins of the CPU and Graphics card cooling units. I blew the junk out and now both CPU and GPU are running 10 degrees cooler — but, I wouldn't have been able to do that without the service manual in front of me.

 

beanier you can try cleaning the fans as mdonah & ItsElliot suggested, also I would recommend you taking a trip to the HP support site (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/support-drivers.html) and enter the product number of your system and try updating the BIOS version. If these steps do not work then you will have to go ahead and face replacing the cpu fan in the system.