A serious problem with laptop

[Zaramorus]

Okay so today was the second time my lenovo laptop t500 goes randmly black while playing Warcraft 3. I started it and i got fan error. So i tried blowing in two holes like i did first time. The second time it didnt work so i pressed esc 2 times and now i wont get fan error anymore, but im afriad ill get this fan error shit again so how can i fix it totally? Should i buy a new computer or something? I think this laptop is like 4 or 6 years old too.

 

[Squiggy]

Can you reproduce the fan error and paste it here?
It's hard to do a remote diagnosis with only faint knowledge of the symptoms.

Might be an overly dirty fan which leads to overheating.

 

[Zaramorus]

Can you reproduce the fan error and paste it here?
It's hard to do a remote diagnosis with only faint knowledge of the symptoms.

Might be an overly dirty fan which leads to overheating.

Well there isnt really much to say about it. I start my computer. After the thinkpad thing there is just fan error in the left upper corner and everything else is black. Okay weird is that this fan error happened the second time today too and something is weird. I have gotten this fan error 3 times already and all ive gotten while playing Warcraft 3...

 

[Squiggy]

That's most likely a dirty fan.
Try buying a can of compressed air and spray it into the slid where your fan pulls in the cold air.
If that doesn't help, disassemble your laptop as descibed in one of the thousands of videos and clean it by hand - carefully.

Still no use? Time to get a new fan.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Try buying a can of compressed air and spray it into the slid where your fan pulls in the cold air.

So the dust can just get compacted even more on the heat sink!

If the laptop is under warrantee then taking it to be repaired is the only thing you can do (since opening it yourself will likely void the warrantee). If its warrantee has expired then open it up carefully (watch youtube videos of how to do it, remember to avoid using a lot of force as a laptop is not a car) and clean out the fan. If you notice anything physically wrong with the fan then consider replacing the fan.

"Fan Error" appears to be generated if the CPU fan drops below a minimum speed. This can happen for any number of reasons such as incorrectly setup BIOS, physical wear on the fan causing it to drop below thresholds to the fan outright dying (not turning anymore).

If the fan does fail the chance of it damaging your CPU should be almost an impossibility. All modern x86 CPUs (especially from Intel although I think AMD as well) will immediately enter low power mode upon overheating to prevent damage. Although not recommended, you should be able to happily remove and attach heatsinks on running performance x86 processors without them being thermally damaged.

However overheating can damage other less precisely engineered parts of the system, specifically the motherboard and power circuitry. CPUs and GPUs can heat up hotter than other parts of the system can handle resulting in other critical failures. For example with the NVidia 8800 GT graphic card it had a critical overheating issue where if it was loaded with certain types of Direct3D 10 graphics (such as used by StarCraft II) it would overheat the power circuitry causing the card to become unstable and possibly even burning out the power circuitry. The GPU did not throttle back due to overheating as it was still within designed specifications, just the card itself could not cope with those temperatures.

 

[Velmarshal]

Fan errors usually pop up when the fan isn't spinning or is slowed for whatever reason.
Open that thing up, clean the dust and try starting it again, if the problem persists, replace the fan or the laptop.

 

[Zaramorus]

Funny was that i gave it to my uncle and he said that there was no dust at all. Some contraption got fucked up tho and will need to buy a new one from China. My uncle taped some box onto my laptop which helps my laptop not overheat. But yeah thread can be closed since the problem is solved.

 

[gorillabull]

just buy a new laptop judging by the type of error you get the laptop you currently have is really outdated and poorly designed there shouldnt be any interruptions like this even if the fan stops working in fact something like this should only happen if any of the components reach a critical temperature

 

[Dr Super Good]

just buy a new laptop judging by the type of error you get the laptop you currently have is really outdated and poorly designed there shouldnt be any interruptions like this even if the fan stops working in fact something like this should only happen if any of the components reach a critical temperature

ASUS motherboards run a fan test during device initialization before running the bootstrap loader. It will hang at that screen unless you press the appropriate key to ignore it and continue to the bootstrap loader.

My I7 computer had such an error and it is far from outdated.