Fan Died and Came Back to Life

[liammac001]

I have an HP Envy 17 with an i7 and GT 840M. So the other day I was watching a DVD on it in my bed, and it wad working fine. I got up to do something and closed it, and it made a strange noise. I figured it was the DVD or something. I didn't think much of it. But later when I opened it back up the fan never ramped up like it usually does after resuming and I was sitting at a black screen. I couldn't do anything so I pressed the power button and rebooted. A message cane up warning me that a fan was broken and the system would shutdown in 15 seconds unless I hit enter and that using the laptop with a broken fan might damage it. I hit enter and booted into Windows. I tried playing skyrim to see if the fan would kick on and it didn't . so I exited and forgot about it. A little while later I got on and played Torchlight 2 for half an hour which I know was stupid but the laptop never shut down. However looking at some things told me that the gpu was throttling hard. Anyways not wanting to break anything I shut the laptop down and got back on the next day but this time I booted into OpenSuse, which is a linux distro. I was just typing and screwing around and all of a sudden the fan made a horibble noise like it was caught on something then burst back to life. I almost had a heart attack, but I rebooted and sure enough there was no warning and the fan was spinning away. Its only been a half an hour since then but the fan seems to be working fine. Does anyone have any ideas why this happened and what I can do to prevent it from happening again?

 

[Mind Games]

The fans were probably poorly soldered or the soldering broke since they were installed. Another reason may be that the fans weren't soldered but instead cabled into a port which was not responding properly due to a rootkit virus. Many reasons can be the cause of the fan not working, to prevent it I would recommend placing the laptop on cooling pad with extra fans so it will take stress off of that fan when you have it on your lap.