Weird fan noise at startup on my envy 15 [VIDEO]

Just bought this refurb from Best Buy, does anyone elses do this?? I have 3 options; it is still within the 14 day return period, theres 90 days HP warranty, or I can fix it myself. The PROBLEM is is that I've already spent literally 2 days time transferring EVERYTHING to this new PC. I REALLY do not want to do that again!

This only happens for about 5 minutes when starting up cold.

Oh also dealing with some blue screens, but I think that's pretty common... updated BIOS and all drivers..

YouTube - IMG 1367 - you might have to turn your speakers up.. iPhone video + youtube compression kills it.

 

I've had a lot of fan issues from my previous Sony laptop and it is the most annoying thing. Assuming it is the fan then it's only going to get worse over time. So think about that before your return period ends. If your comfortable swaping out a fan for a brand new one then keep it I guess.

 

I wonder if Best Buy will transfer all of my files for me for free since this is such bull.

 

I personally wouldn't trust anyone else with my files, especially bestbuy. But that's just me.

 

Sounds like a bad fan as pez said. Must of been a bad bearing on one of the fans. It is not that expensive to fix yourself. The part is like $50 per heatsink (the Envy 15 has two heatsinks, so you might need to find out which heatsink has the bad fan) and it is relatively an easy install if you are very comfortable at opening things.

If you got it as a refurb, I am sure it has a 90 day refurb warranty that you can send in the unit to HP for a free-of-charge repair. The only expense is you losing a week's worth of time for the repairs to be done off-site.

However, if you decide to return it then back it up yourself to an external. Don't let BB touch it. Ever. Geek Squad is terrible.

 

If you're willing to do some "surgical" dissection of the fan assembly I think you can possibly solve this issue. You would need to open the metal fan casing which is usually just held in place with bendable tabs. Sometimes they're tack welded though. Pull off the fan blade in a vertical direction being careful because theirs a metal rod bearing inside and a circular magnet inside the fan blade cavity. If theres no broken pieces of magnet obvious I would try to lubricate the metal rod with a telfon based electronics lubricant. They have those at radioshack for like $2.99. That usually solves fan noise issues. If it sounds like a scratching issue try to determine where the fan blades are contacting and fix it. Be careful with the fan blades because if 1 breaks then the whole thing is off balance and is pretty much worthless.

 

I ended up pulling it apart, got scared, and put it back together. Going to wait and see what happens, I have 90 days to send it in to HP if it gets worse.