is there something wrong with my fan?

I have a Dell Vostro 1500 with 3gb ram, 250gb 5400 rpm hdd, 8600gt and 2ghz dual core 2, it's about 2 years old

After I play sc2 for about 30-40 minutes the game becomes unplayable. The laptop simply begins to run way too hot, even after I exit the game the laptop runs slow. I usually have to turn it off and let it rest, before I can start doing anything with it again

I downloaded the 18kfan program and set it to "force fans to high speed" but I cant hear them at all - they are deadly silent.

Right now my idle temperature after some light surfing around the web for about 30 minutes is at 50 degrees c, which I don't know whether is normal or not.

Could there be something wrong with my fan? Should I call Dell in the morning and get it sorted or is it something I should try to manage on my own?

 

Either your fan is bad or you have dust bunnies clogging the air vents so you can't hear the fans, probably the latter. I started a thread on this very same subject. If your not shy opening up your laptop you'll need to clean out all the dust that accumulates on the heatsink fins. If you don't want to open up your laptop try compressed air.

 

Will compressed air do, or is it an inferior option? I don't mind opening it up at all. Dell is sending me a replacement keyboard tomorrow, so I can probably do it there.

 

Yes it's inferior. If you don't mind take it apart and do a thorough cleaning, maybe replacing the thermal paste if you have heat problems.

Quick tip: One thing I learned taking my V 1500 apart several times is all you really need to do to clean it is to remove just the videocard since it's the plug in type. Once you remove the videocard you'll have lot's of room to clean the vents and you may not even need to remove the CPU/Chipset heatsink. At that point you can blast away the dust from the top of the laptop with compressed air. I'm referring to the side exhaust vent, btw.

 

I'll do that. Thanks. Any good guides to taking it apart, or will the one on the Dell website do?

 

This is the one I used: Documentation

 

This is what I would do first as most of the dust gets trapped here on the heatsink fins of the GPU card:

 

I just opened up my laptop and there was a huge dust bunny clogging up the fan. I've reassembled it and the idle temp is 20 degrees lower celsius and I can actually hear and feel the fan working. The computers performance also seems, to have gone up a notch. Didn't have thermal paste or compressed air in the computer store so I had to do without.

Thanks for the help.