I was DOTA-ing on Dec 12, and suddenly my Vaio turned off. The game before it turned off was lagging and i realized that my Vaio was overheating. After a very rough inspection made, i found that the cooling fan was not spinning. After finishing another game (thank to FRM for his cooling pad), i went back to my room and start investigating why the fan is not working.

First Inspection:
The fan was stuck. After forcing the fan blades to move, there was something came out from my Vaio, a screw. So that’s the reason why the fan was not spinning.
Second Inspection:
I turned my Vaio on after removing the screw, but then the fan won’t spinning. I disassemble the bottom plate of my laptop to have a look at the fan. Using a screwdriver, i forced the fan blades so that it will move. However, after completing a rotation, it went stop. Therefore, i knew that the fan was not dead, it just stuck at certain angle. Sometimes it will spin but with very noisy like a motorboat.

Third Inspection:
After hours of berangan about the future of my Vaio (am i going to change to another laptop), i gave a try to disassemble my Vaio. It was my first time to fully disassemble my laptop since the fan is located beneath the motherboard. So by hook or by crook, i have to disassemble the motherboard in order to disassemble the fan. I managed to disassemble the fan after a couple of hours and i found that the axis of the fan is not perpendicular to the fan blades. Therefore i went to Giant to buy a pliers and Yakult for extra strength to bend back the fan axis, a metal rod (hehe). Bending the metal rod is easy job but to determine whether the axis of the fan is perpendicularly to the blade was so tiring. After try and error, bend the axis – plug the fan blade to the fan housing – blow the fan – inspect the rotation and noise produced, i managed to align the axis to its very best position.

Assembling the Vaio:
It took me an hour to assemble back my Vaio. I turned on my laptop just after finishing the assembling process. The first problem arose was, the keyboard isn’t function. The second one is, the fan still not spinning! Somehow i forgot to connect the keyboard and fan power supply. Another 5 minutes, i solved the problem. I turned it on again, and the fan is now working (Hooray!). But it still makes some noise, just like there is a neighbor on next 3 floors above me is drilling his wall (Doh!). Im so tired, i wrote this post and go to sleep after that.