What’s that noise?

It started out as a low humming noise emanating from my laptop. Over the next few days, it started getting a little louder. It almost sounded like a baseball card stuck in a bicycle wheel. My first thought was “Please don’t let it be the processor fan”.

I held my ear close to where the processor fan is located and it sounded like it was coming right from it. It still sounded the same as I moved across the back of my laptop but not around the front. I then disconnected the Chill Mat that my laptop sits atop of and the noise stopped. WHOOOOOOO! It wasn’t the processor fan! The noise was coming from the fans on the Chill Mat.

I wrote about the Chill Mat back in April. It’s a dual-fan laptop cooler that works really well. I picked it up for about $20 so I wasn’t too worried if it was dying on me. Since it is pretty cheap, I decided to take it apart and see if I could fix it.

The fans are attached to the bottom half of the mat and one of them was scraping against a piece of plastic that forms one of the air tunnels. I tried moving the fan but it didn’t budge. I also tried slightly bending the mat, as if I were making it into a horseshoe, so that the fan would be pulled away from the piece of plastic it was hitting. That helped it somewhat but the noise would start back just as loud if I put all the screws back into the mat. I found that the noise stopped if I left the three screws out of the center of the mat (near the fans) so that a small space was left between the top and bottom half. That still left four screws, near the corners, to hold the halves together. I figured that was good enough since my laptop sits on top of the mat and I rarely move it (it’s a desktop replacement).

Fixing the problem without having to buy a new mat is a good. The problem not being the laptop processor fan is great.

The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. – Norman Vincent Peale

02.Dec.05 Hardware, Technology