What Noise?

Came home this afternoon and fired up the PC. After 10 minutes or so the noise came back. I unplugged everything from the back of the tower and dragged it out into the middle of the floor. I got out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up as much dust as I could out. I pulled out the CPU fan and it?s housing from inside the PC and boy was it dusty. I spun the fan and it turned jerkily, no noise, but it didn’t rotate smoothly. I removed the 2 screws mounting the power supply and contemplated unhooking all the connections to remove the unit from the tower, but decided I would wait and see if it was the CPU fan first.

I hooked up all the cables, leaving the CPU fan out, and fired up the PC. While I let the PC run I vacuumed out the fan real good, but couldn’t find any place where I might be able to lube the motor shaft. After about 15 minutes and no noise I figured that the CPU fan was indeed the culprit. Shut down the PC and reinstalled the fan. I started the PC again, leaving the case wide open with the intent of waiting until the noise started and then unplugging the fan to confirm that it was bad.

After 30 minutes the noise hadn’t returned, so I buttoned the case back up. The PC will be left on tonight and we’ll see if we get woken in the middle night of the night by a rumbling fan…