Fan makes a lot of noise

[agentrozanova]

I've been noticing that my laptop fan has been making a lot of noise at times, mostly while playing games on Facebook or watching videos on Youtube.

Last year my laptop had been heating up and shutting itself off and I opened it, cleaned it and applied thermal paste. I've done the same now because I thought that the fan needed cleaning again, but the problem persists.

Is there anything I can do?

Thanks.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I see you have a Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM; that laptop might be 5 or more years old?

Fans fail, usually slowly, and get noisier as they do. Five plus years in a laptop environment is at least middle aged.

Have you shopped for a new replacement?

I've heard of lubricating fans, but that may not help and may be difficult in a laptop situation.

 

[agentrozanova]

It is 5 years old.

So should I get a new fan?

The laptop is also a bit slow at times.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Slowness is unlikely to be due to a fan unless the system is so hot that the CPU is at a dangerous level and is throttling down as they will do by design in that situation.

Do you monitor your temps well enough to know if it has been running hotter than expected?

I know nothing about fan replacement on a laptop, but I suspect it can be done and is likely a bigger pain than doing it on a desktop PC, where it is a simple job.

Slowness is tough to evaluate. Slow all the time? Slow doing certain things? Slow doing one or two things now that you didn't do at all 4 years ago? How accurate is your memory for how fast it was at a particular task when everything was fine? Have you done normal maintenance tasks like defragging the hard drive, running virus and malware checks, kept tabs on hard drive free space, running disk cleanup, etc?