The fan on my T23 laptop started to make a horrible noise a few days ago. I immediately thought I'd need to replace it, and started researching how to pull the laptop apart.

But then I found this info about a pulsing fan. The problem doesn't really affect my model, but I thought I'd see if I could fix it by controlling the fan speed manually.

Unfortunately, the the fan control modules aren't available in kernel 2.6.11, which is the one I was using, without patching. I didn't want to have to do that, so I decided to upgrade the kernel to the latest in Debian sid, 2.6.21.

The good side of this was that the fan control software really does work and that by using a Thinkpad fan control script I have much better control of the fan.

Unfortunately, the upgrade and certain side affects:

• 1) X stopped working
• 2) The mouse stopped working
• 3) No sound

And besides if the fan is on speed "four", it still buzzes.

I'm not really sure why X stopped working. To fix it, I tried upgrading it and included the "savagefb" framebuffer device. It still didn't work. Eventually, I found out that it was because, it couldn't couldn't find the "mouse". Installing the "psmouse" module seemed to fix this. Wasn't it already installed?

But then the machine would freeze on "resume" after a suspend/resume cycle. I found out that the "savagefb" module causes this and needed to remove it. I couldn't remove the module while the computer was as the module was "in use". Trying to boot with uptions "vga=no" or "nofb" didn't work. The solution was to delete the lines containing "savagedb" in /etc/modules.

A reboot fixed it, but I had to manually insert the soundcore module. Now, I find that sound doesn't work after a suspend/resume cycle. I need to do the new:

/etc/init.d/alsa force-reload

which does get sound working again, but quits all the applications which are using sound.

The fan was still buzzing. I had to take apart the laptop and clean it with some compressed air. Yuk!