murks

About a week ago two ago my laptop's fan started to get loud. Real loud. Sometimes it didn't even start on boot, resulting in the message 'fan error'. I took that to mean that it is high time to replace it.

I was considering replacing the entire machine, it is about 5-6 years old after all. Instead I decided to just replace the fan and keep using the laptop. I had to replace the HD sometime last year and the battery is rather useless but the laptop should do for another few years. So I finally got the replacement fan today and just put it in. Nice and quiet again, perhaps even a few degrees less. Putting it in wasn't too pleasant, the power connector was tiny and finicky. The replacement fan had sort of a pad of dried cooling paste on it. I didn't trust it and cleaned it off, which wasn't easy at first but worked eventually. I still had some cooling paste from last year when I replaced the paste and applied that instead. I wonder whether this pad of dried paste is normal. The fan looked new, clean, and the 'pad' looked factory made as it had small dimples in the corners. Anyway, it worked out, but the replacement fan set me back 75 Euro, way more than it should.

I also decided to build a new machine from the ground up, for probably the first time in more than ten years. The actually good and brand new fan for the brand new processor costs me only about 40 Euro. On the upside, I got the replacement fan sooner than expected. On the downside I was hoping to get the parts for the new machine before the weekend, but probably won't be before Tuesday. At least the laptop keeps going for now and I've had some practice with cooler installation. I'm looking forward to my new machine. Putting it together will probably be fun, system setup not so much. Installing and especially configuring the Linux distribution of my choice will take me days. It will be the newest rig I've ever had with a processor that came out this quarter and a graphics card that came out about two weeks ago. Compared to my laptop it has three times as many cores and graphics-wise it's about ten years ahead. Unless I run into major problems the machine should be a huge improvement and last me a couple of years.