The first rule of computing is to RTFM. The lesser known but equally important corollary to that rule is to be sure you are reading the right manual. If I had remembered that, I could have saved myself 3 hours of frustration this evening.
Some time back, my real job was cleaning out their inventory of older computer hardware. While it was old for the office, it was still newer than anything I had up and running around my house[ref]I maybe be a techie, but I’m also cheap frugal.[/ref] They had several laptops (in states of disrepair) of the same make/model[ref]HP Pavilion dv8000[/ref] as I currently use at work. Seeing how I kind of like my work laptop, I decided to grab the lot of them.
I then bought all the necessary parts to bring 2 of the laptops up to working order. Only while I was working on them, I noticed that one of the lot was based on an Intel+Nvidia chipset –the rest were AMD+ATI– and that one was slightly lighter weight than the others. As I was doing all the work finding, buying and rebuilding these laptops; I figured I’d treat myself to the Intel+Nvidia version of the laptop to enjoy the slightly lighter weight. I saved the rest of the lot to use for spare parts if/when it became necessary.
Then recently one of the fans in my laptop began making a horrible grinding noise whenever the CPU was under any kind of load. Tonight I got sick enough of the noise that I shutdown my laptop, pulled up the maintenance & service guide and got to work dissembling one of the spare parts laptops to get out the fan I need. It turns out that the fan dieing in my laptop is part of the fan assembly unit which cools the CPU. So the instructions for removing this piece are extensive, but in the end basically tell you to complete disassemble the entire laptop.
I’d nearly completely the disassembly of the spare parts laptop when I remembered that one was an AMD based machine and mine is based on Intel. But both machines are labeled as dv8000 and searching HP’s support website for manuals on the dv8000 only turns up AMD machines. Hmm, searching on the product number on the bottom of my laptop returns results for a HP Pavilion dv8230us. And while the manuals page for a dv8230us does link to the same maintenance & service guide; it also links to what it calls HP Pavilion dv8000 Notebook PC – Maintenance and Service Guide. However if you download & read the first page of this second m&s guide; you’ll find the file refers to dv8300. Though the details seem to be mostly the same as the dv8000, excepting that it uses Intel+Nvidia. One of the other minor details that was not the same was the part# for the fan assembly and from some quick googling on that; it would appear the fan assemblies in the AMD & Intel machines are not compatible with each other. *sigh* 3 hours down the drain.