I spent good deal of day today fixing howling, growling, roaring and making other unpleasant noises fan in my Asus X34F notebook. X34F appears to be region-specific version of U35F, and motherboard bears labels of UL30A, so I guess this may be pertinent to them either.
I wasn't able to find a service manual, so I proceeded with disassembly by experience and intuition. It turns out that to detach cooler one needs to unscrew one motherboard plate completely (there're two, bound with a connector). The cooler part number turned out to be KDB04505HA by Delta Electronics. Vendor site showed no trace of this part no. But quick googling showed that it's the same part no used in Macbook Pro with similar performance stories. One another reason you don't need to pay a lot to get the same c.r.a.p.
Once I completely detached it, I figured how it could make those noises - impeller could dance on its axis, and while doing so could touch plastic casing. So, my idea was to either cut the corresponding side of impeller, or increase vertical space in which it "dances". I went for the latter, adding two washers between metal and plastic casing parts and gluing another washer on third point to get more support.
I decided also to oil fan, and considering oiling with machine oil could lead to just more dust accumulation, figure I take a pencil and oil it with graphite. Big mistake - either that pencil didn't really have pure graphite, or I put it there too much, but after re-assembling and powering all stuff, I saw that the cooler stopped working at all.
I almost gave up and started to look for closest repair shop, then figured I already have thing half-disassembled, and they would need to extract the fan anyway, so guessed I do it myself and deliver it to repairman in pieces. But before then, heck, I'll make another pass it it - first of all, try to power it on despite its rather home-use unfriendly connector.
Couldn't reliably figure the connector pinout (found pinout only for 12V desktop fans, who knows if laptop one would be proprietary), so tried googling for wire color codes instead. This page gave me good hints (black - GND, red - VCC, blue - PWM for speed control, yellow or another - speed sensor) which I decided to try with power supply at last. Unfriendly connector? Was able to stick into it breadboard wires, then breadboard, then breadboard power adapter. Saw the motor nudge, as struggling with friction. Took off the impeller, wiped its axis, and cleaned other part as best as I could. Put it back and powered, and so it moving - but, with whistling and vibration, even though suspected plastic part was off. Well, decided there's little to lose and oiled it with smallish drop of machine oil.
That was it! The thing stopped its hellish screams and just monotonically buzzed if move ear close to it. Reassembled all the stuff - the noise level is close to that which was when I bought it, as far as I can tell. acpitz sensor temperature is down to 55dC from 95dC I saw before. Finger crossed that oiling will help for decent time.
Conclusion and note to myself: It's indeed nice idea to be in power of your hardware, no doubts, and fears off. And its better to invest into tools than to pay for services of unknown quality (could easily imagine the same oiling to be done, but charged as replacement).
UPDATE: No, it didn't last even a day :-(
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