Replacement of Fan in Dell Dim. 2400

[Steve_69]

I tried this last night and went almost overkill with all of the detail, had forgotton my password so couldn't submit, got it sent to me and finally got in but there was no submit button after retrying to sign-in; refreshed my page and lost everything!!

So to keep from going through that again, calling Dell to tell them I think that my fan crapped out and my computer was running slow, he looked up my model and suggested storage & memory increases and wanted to know which fan (stating there were three). I told him I didn't know, but have found that the upper one is working and it seems like one perhaps around the middle of the case. Saw on another post that there was a schematic on the dell support site, but the link took me to a page error; moved document warning. I perused around the site and found some instructions for the disassembly and replacement of parts but it shows no fans!?!

Anyway, I have an external hard drive and settled on 1 Gig of memory from the standard 256MB, and that and the fan should be here within a few days, so anyone got advice or instructions on how, and how hard to install the fan is? The memory card looks easy, but it suggests watching static electricity so though this is not a nylon rug, I guess I should work it elsewhere?

Thanks in advance.

 

[delluser1]

Not hard at all.
The fan is mounted in a shroud with rubber pins, the biggest worry is that these pins are so old that they may break. ( Unless you're getting the entire assembly )
Flip up the green portion of the shroud and unplug the fan.
On the bottom of the black part of the shroud is a release lever, depress it and pull the assembly up away from the MB.
Now carefully pull the fan out of the shroud, you want the pins to come out as well ( it's much easier to install them on the fan before putting it back in the shroud ), if they don't come out just remove them after the fan is out of the way.
Then reinstall in reverse order, making sure to reinstall the new fan in the same direction as the old one.

As long as you aren't shuffling your feet, and you remember to touch the power supply to ground yourself, you shouldn't have any worries about static when installing the ram.

 

[Steve_69]

You are making it sound as if there's (like I would've suspected) only one fan; the Dell rep said there were three. What crapped out did so after making a tinny, chirpy noise for a couple of weeks or so with a little grinding getting more noticeable towards the end; kind of like if you had a metal disc turning and set an arm on it like a turn table on a record and it would bog down with a mild grinding sound, then let up. Now there's no noise what so ever, but when spraying the cabinet with canned air, the "straw" went in the back upper fan housing and you could hear the fan hitting it while turning. Blowing lower down in the case, the squeaking, squawking, grinding noise started back and only lasted about 20 - 30 minuted before it died again. noticing now that for some reason, my virus scan that started late last night is STILL running and thinking, hoping that it's due to the boards not being cool enough and not a hard drive problem (though it worked fine pretty much the whole time of the noise and even after tyhe noise first stopped a few days ago, but now is off and on bogging down - haven't run a clean-up again). Still wondering about the "3 fans"?!

 

[Steve_69]

Oh, sorry, got a little rambly, but upon rebooting as it was running excessively slow yesterday morning, I noticed a warning (much like when your computer has been shut down to prevent damage, but on a black screen in lieu of a blue) saying a fan is not running, or something to that effect; press F1 or F2 to proceed.

 

[delluser1]

There's 2 , 1 system, 1 in the power supply.
This is horrible, but that's what people sometimes bring me;

System fan failure press F1 to continue, you're fan is shot.

 

[Steve_69]

So the system fan sounds like the culprit? That picture looks like the fan reversed and sucked up every bit of dust in the neighborhood!!