The Enspired Blog

A few weeks ago I began to notice a significant amount of noise emanating from my Macbook Pro. It started as a winding sound and grew louder and louder as the processor and hard drive worked feverishly to process 380,000 records of property data from the county. The noise became a sustained mooing sound that was insanely loud for a laptop.

At first I thought it was the hard drive, which really concerned me. It seemed to ebb and flow with the amount of processor and disk I/O the Macbook was handling. After a few days I had to figure out what it was, so I turned to google. In the end it was YouTube that provided the answer. It turns out that Macbook Pros are notorious for two problems, bad batteries and mooing fans.

So at this point, since I am not the original owner of this hardware and am not covered under any Apple Care program, I decided to service it myself. A few searches revealed that a handful of online stores carried the replacement parts, but I couldn’t find anyone who had it in stock. I added my email to be notified when inventory became available and put it on the back-burner.

After another week of enduring the worsening noise, I made another quick search for the part. To my surprise I stumbled upon powerbookmedic.com, who just happened to have one unit in stock. I placed my order in a most furious manner to assure that some other mooing fan victim didn’t snag the last available right fan assembly on the entire Internet. With a sense of great victory, my order was processed, confirmed and shipped in a matter of hours.

The part arrived yesterday and I made the simple swap last night. All is well, and the mooing fan has been silenced. A quick run of rake spec:rcov confirmed that the new fan is functioning and the noise has been squelched. I sincerely hope that I don’t need a left fan assembly anytime soon.