For everyone who is considering buying a laptop, try to get to know as many details as possible. This is a big lesson I had to learn after two years of pain with a Acer Aspire 3000. Last year I had to return the device back to Acer because the battery-connector on the motherboard died suddenly (the battery was already empty, and power from the AC did not work anymore). After two months of being laptop-less it did return with twice as much ram and a new motherboard, but unfortunately, the hard disk returned with a few broken clusters on it's surface, though I was able to recover almost all my data, the hard disk was not usable anymore.
Later that year, in September last year, it suddenly failed to boot properly (and got extremely hot, over 90 degrees Celcius). So, as a precaution I took the device back to the supplier where I bought it. They removed a piece of metal that was blocking the cpu fan from running, and told me to clean the motherboard regular to prevent the device from causing a fire, and so I did.
Last month the cpu-fan started failing more often, and when performing heavy tasks like compiling stuff, the system went too hot and the system went down. Besides the many times I had to recover my file-system this worried me and predicted it's early death.
So, last night, the fan died not so suddenly. I plugged out all the cables, turned the device on it's back, and used a screw driver to open up my digital friend. The cpu-fan was smelling very bad. I removed the stinky black fan and leaved the pane of the backside open. I mounted the laptop on some improvised wooden construction to get some space underneath it. I took a big table-fan (which is under normal conditions only used on hot summer days) and settled it to the right side of the laptop to generate airflow, to get the device cooled.
The ironical part of the whole story is that now I'm cooling it with this table-fan, the temperature is stable at a firm 40'C, while back in the days with the cpu-fan, it went up to 80 degrees when idle.
So, here my request, is there somebody that has a broken laptop like this one?, or somebody that thinks he's able to get spare parts for this Acer Aspire 3000?. If somebody is really able with helping me out. I'm going to thank him personaly! Because it would enable me to take my laptop with me to the FOSDEM event at the end of February.
edit: This is the broken fan:
