Fan on acer shot what now?

My fan on my Acer Aspire 7720z is shot, I am guessing after all the extreme gaming leaving it on over night for downloads finally burnt it out, What should I do to keep it cool until I get enough money to afford a new fan? Any help is appreaciated.

you could try getting a laptop cooling pad. They work pretty good

Well typically in a case like this you can buy the OEM parts from a third party retailer. Ive done this with dell laptops numerous times but none of the retailers I have used seem to sell Acer parts or if they do, they do not have the 7720z listed.

My advise is to contact Acer and request a replacement heatsink or fan, and odds are they will send you one. They might charge you a few bucks for it, but at least its cheaper than a new laptop or the hassle of tracking down model numbers or finding compatible units from other makes/models.

Its not hard to replace a heatsink. Typically you just remove a few screws, pop off the keyboard, and then unscrew the heatsink, replace it (or the fan specifically), apply new thermal paste, and pop it back on and reassemble the unit. If you have ever replaced a hard drive or upgraded the memory in a laptop, its really not much more difficult

*edit*
And using a laptop cooler may or may not fix the issue. The fact is, if the fan that pushes cold air over the CPU heatsink is dead, the cpu is not going to get proper cooling. A laptop cooling board might help this if your laptop has intake vents on the bottom, but if the bottom of your laptop is just plastic and contains no openings for your fans, then your out of luck and a laptop cooler wont do anything but cool the plastic which wont help solve this problem.

Thanks for the help guys, the Acer has a opening at the bottom and the side to let air out, and I also looked on the acer website and its not listed in there so I think I will go with an external fan. Also does the Bios have any control over fan speed?

no. you also can not use speedfan to software control the fan, unless your acer is different.

i have the 5570z, and to get to the fan,y uo haev to COMPLETELY disassemble the laptop. no joke. meaning, in my case, three screws behind the laptop, remove the top plastic pad, three more screws under that plastic strip, ALL the screws at the bottom, four screws on the screen, remove keyboard (be careful of the FFC cable - also remove the one for the touchpad), remove modem and wifi links, remove the two bottom flaps (hdd, ram), remove the screws hidden by them, open the chassis while taking extra care for the audio ports AND the side s-video port (which is actually sort of eating into the plastic) and then removing a few more screws which hold the motherboard to the bottom plastic piece, then carefully remove the motherboard, which exposes the screws on the other side which you need to gain access to for the fan.

Obviously that is only but a quick overview. i think i counted over thirty screws and trust me, remembering where they all go wasnt funny in my case.

one thing you can try is to oil the fan's bearings (which, sadly enough, you have to remove the motherboard entirely to get to the plastic cover of the fan) - that is normally what happens when a fan "dies out" - the bearings simply seize up. i've revived several sleeve bearing fans, and i've actually quietened down a couple ball bearing fans - but i do not know if this can revive ball bearing fans. chances are not as good as for sleeve bearing fans is what i can say though.


here is a guide to oiling fans:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,...135514-1,00.htm