ThinkPad "Fan Error" and burning smell...

[uberman]

X201, 2.53 i5, 8 GB RAM, Win 7 Pro rebooted because I lost WiFi connection, upon reboot "Fan Error," and burnt smell (not strong) no smoke, pretty warm metal parts though.

I've been trying to correct a WiFi connection going out, so I reinstalled Windows before pulling out hardware. Reinstalling Windows was easy because I just cloned it from a backup of the original install for this laptop. This morning upon reboot "Fan Error" message, so...has computer been overheating? is this why WiFi card might be tired?

Now, to deal with this and because I don't like leaving a laptop case cracked wide open for 8 weeks why I wait for parts to arrive, should I order a new fan and Wifi card and then open the laptop when I'm ready to replace them? Or should I crack the case and get the part numbers so I make sure I get the correct parts?

When I used to run 5 workstations, I always had at least one tower that the case was open because I'm a perpetual upgrader, but laptops are smaller and I believe that there is less room to tolerate dust and whatnot.

Since I have five X201 laptops, how can I prevent this from happening again? Should I use a temperature monitoring program? If so, are there any recommendations as to which one?

If it was a tower I'd just open the case and look around, but because its a laptop and parts are smaller and not as configureable I'm not quite sure how I should proceed here. Any advice is appreciated.

I let it get cold, rebooted-> Fan Error->shut down->reboot->running OK
I guess I'll have to crack case and replace fan parts-> can't afford to play around with this.

 

[fire400]

x201 was an awesome series that retained all the good elements with separate touchpad click buttons and the original thinkpad keyboard before it changed over dramatically on the x220 designs.

check thermal paste. and mod with copper blocks if you have to, but I'd replace the fan to begin with, as far as overheating is concerned.

motherboard perhaps is already at the beginning stage of defective and chronic damage has already probably occurred, so don't be alarmed if the computer doesn't turn on, on any random given day, with these symptoms you've shared so far.

replace fan, but don't expect unit to last forever especially after going through a stage like this. so basically, be ready to replace the motherboard if need be.

as far as the wifi card, they are known to go out and are not unheard of. depending on how you search for replacements on eBay, some listings are not detailed and you can get the wifi cards for extremely cheap with enough research.

thinkpads with the first generation Intel i-series processors were on an experimental stage, and many units w/ the first gen-i-series faced major issues that core 2 duo models and i5-2nd gen and beyond models did not have, generally speaking. think of it as a hotter temperature core 2 duo before the processors shrunk and became much, much more TDP efficienct with sandy and ivy generation architectures and beyond.

x201 isn't that bad to replace the fan on. recommend AS5 for thermal paste to give it some extra life time and using some mobil grease on the fan bearings to keep 'em spinning without too much trapped-dust/gunk-stuttering.

as far as other thinkpads, lifespan is usually at the 3yr as with most laptops, and will require maintenance, mark before fans start failing or case unnecessary overheating and thermal paste will start to crust.

after they get proper maintenance, a lot of thinkpads can go far, far beyond the usual lifespan of what elitebooks and latitudes can ever wish to achieve based on i.t. environments and degradation of motherboard-to-software performance ratio from new in box status.

acer computers have the worse degradation rate on its motherboards in terms of lifespan, next on the list are dells which usually have tons of BIOS issues that can cause random crashing/slowdown.

 

[nerp]

The fan/cooling assembly can be replaced easily. Either that or it just needs a cleaning/blowing out of dust. You can reapply thermal paste to the heatsink.

Agree with above poster. ThinkPads are the best in the business and can be repaired and tuned up like no other brand.

Check out /thinkpad on Reddit for more advice.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

What a damn coincidence OP.
My X201 just gave me the same problem this morning. It was very cool on startup, got the fan error, went away after it warmed up some and hasn't occurred since.

At least the fans are cheap (~$2.30 on eBay).

 

[uberman]

Thanks Fire400. It seems that this X201 has been overheating for sometime. Its been going in and out of sleep and/or shutdown; wifi problems; blue screen every 5,000 to 10,000 hours. Other symptoms have been fairly chronic and happening too often the last 60 days.

It's simply that it has been so subtle. No burned fingers from touching hot metal and no smoke or flames. As advised I should replace the fan, grab some new thermal paste, certainly the wifi card. This will be a learning experience. My laptop upgrades have been hard drives, RAM and OS hacks.

You have a good point that the mobo may have sustained damage. If that's the case I'll look for the fastest processor and mobo this one will handle. I really like the X201 which is why I have several. I'm even thinking of just grabbing another X201 because there are lots of them in the SF Bay Area. I could use this one for parts and besides I've vacillated over replacing the keyboard before.

I'm looking for a temperature monitoring utility for future protection. I downloaded "Core Temp 1.1," and although it works great on the Thinkpad T61 that I'm typing on now, it would not load on the X201.

The T61, 2.20 GHZ, 15.4 inch screen, Nvidia card is a pleasure to type on. I bought one for $80.00 and realized that they were new, virgin keyboard and new battery. I went back and grabbed several more and my friend grabbed two. I've been upgrading them with maximum RAM (8GB) and 1 TB hard drives. For movies, music and word processing they're fine. You can really get addicted to Thinkpads.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The T61, 2.20 GHZ, 15.4 inch screen, Nvidia card is a pleasure to type on. I bought one for $80.00 and realized that they were new, virgin keyboard and new battery. I went back and grabbed several more and my friend grabbed two. I've been upgrading them with maximum RAM (8GB) and 1 TB hard drives. For movies, music and word processing they're fine. You can really get addicted to Thinkpads.

Wow, sounds like a decent deal. I recently picked up an Acer Cloudbook with a N3050. Yeah, it's kind of slow. I got it "refurb", but it could have easily been new. I put Mint 18 on it, finally got that figured out. It's working nice now.

 

[uberman]

Wow, sounds like a decent deal.

They're a decent deal and it's my hobby so I light fooling with them. The difficult part here is the 8 GB of DDR2,SODIMM, 667MHZ which is currently going for $115.00 on up. I've replaced it on 3 of my T61, but I'm waiting for the price to drop to finish 4 or 5 machines. I've got lots of docking stations for all which can be fun, including the ThinkPad 2503 Advanced Dock that accepts an extra hard drive and supports half-size PCI Express cards, including graphics adapters that enable multi-monitoring. There are lots of options and configurations available. I'm in the center of the silicon valley so there are lots of parts available.

You said you put Mint on your used Acer. I've found Linux Ubuntu to be less ram hungry than WIN7 64, but I use a lot of windows programs so I'm bumping up the ram. I like others here may find myself migrating over to linux as microsoft products become more difficult to use, subscriptions, less flexibility and such.