intric8 wrote:Last thing on this for the moment. Many of the A1000 fans over time begin to generate a "clunking" noise. It's a very common problem (3 of my 5 do this). The fan still works and blows air, but it sounds like someone flicking a wooden leg to a stool back there. If you remove the fan, on the inside there is a little hole. In theory, if you can inject a small amount of petroleum oil into that hole, it can work its way into the bearings and remove that noisy fan issue entirely and post-pone a replacement for a long time.
Yes, thats exactly the noise this fan was making. I didn’t know about injecting oil into the hole but definitely something to try for next time!
So my fan experience was as follows:
The noise coming out of this thing was getting too much to bear, and it would come and go. Sometimes it would be almost silent and then it would start to rattle up again after 10 mins or so of use.
There was a fellow on amibay selling NOS 220v 1000 power supplies for a reasonable price. After a couple of months of my messages going unanswered I gave up on that and started to look for a fan replacement. As you mentioned not the easiest thing in the world to find!
I eventually handed it off to a member of our local user group who is also a very good tech. He found a suitable (inexpensive) 8cm fan but I don’t remember the brand/model. When I see him next I’ll ask him about it. But you’re absolutely right you need a resistor in there to lower its output. Once again my tech did this for me, so I will quiz him on which value resistor he used. Otherwise I’ll open the case and take some photos of everything to show how it was done (I don’t like to open the case too often because those little plastic clips have a habit of breaking off after a while).
That’s fantastic that you were able to locate the original fan manufacturer. Is it ETRI or something like that? Like everything in the 1000, they used quality parts. $70 seems like a lot but it could be worse.
Even though I generally don’t really like fans at all, the A1000 fan is tolerable - it just sort of sounds like really quiet airconditioning. One of the reasons I probably wouldn’t use an A2000 for my daily driver is the fan noise. Some people don’t seem to mind the noise, but I really like quiet computers!