[NTLK] OT: Dust bunnies in my MBP

Andrei Chichak newton at chichak.ca
Tue Sep 21 02:04:59 EDT 2010


'evenin' all y'all,

My son was a bit worried about the growling noise coming out of his 10 month old 13" MacBook Pro, so we took it apart to hammer out the dents (!) and check the fan. Great googly-moogly, you should have seen the dust bunny stuck in the exhaust grill of the fan. It was pretty much plugged solid. I'm surprised there was any air flow at all.

The growling was a dry bushing in the fan. It was really easy to fix. About 10 screws to remove the base plate, 3 screws to hold on the fan, and one screw to hold the fan housing together. Pop off the fan rotor, add a drop of oil, and the fan was back to new. Kill the dust bunnies, and back together it went. It only needed a 0/00 Phillips screwdriver. The power cable to the fan just snaps down, no tools necessary.

Then I got worried about my 15" MBP that has been working on the World Community Grid projects for curing cancer, clean water, muscular dystrophy and such for the last 18 months, day and night. I pulled it apart and the two fans were twice as bad. 1/4 inch thick dust bunnies in the exhaust grills. No wonder it has been running hot. 

The fan housings come apart with two screws each, but the rotors don't come off.  They weren't making any noise so I cleaned them out and put the system back together again. Now the system is running quite a bit cooler. I can keep it in my lap without an insulating book.

Sorry for the off topic stuff, just trying to save the world.


Andrei


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