Apparent fan failure on my Dell Dimension 8300 computer.

Factual Questions
1

So i turn my computer on this morning, and during the boot process, before Windows starts up, i get a message saying “Alert! Previous Fan Failure.”

I continue with regular setup, but notice that the usual roar from the computer’s main fan is absent. I open up the computer and see that the fan does not seem to be spinning at all. Obviously i have a problem.

A few questions:

  1. I assume i should not use my computer until the fan is fixed or replaced. Is this correct?

  2. Is there any way for me to tell, without taking it to a computer place, whether the problem is with the fan itself, or with the power supply it’s getting from the motherboard?

  3. I know that Dell uses proprietary power supplies for many of their computers. Is this the case with fans? If i need a new fan, will i have to buy it from Dell, or will i be able to get one from somewhere like NewEgg?

Any other advice people might have, or experience with this particular problem, i’d be most happy to hear about it.

2

If you need to use your computer now, you can safely do so (temporarily) by removing the cover and placing a small fan so that it blows into the open case. The fan should not be difficult to replace. Check the voltage and current ratings (found on the fan label; most will be 12 V at a few tens of mA) against any replacement you might consider, and obviously check the size - probably an 80 mm. If the plug on the end of the fan wiring is nonstandard or proprietary, you can cut off the plugs and splice the old connector onto the new fan, being careful to observe proper polarity. I recommend either wire nuts or crimp-on butt connectors to make the splice.

3

Step one: get all the dust bunnies out of the PC.

Then, find the fan that’s not running. Take it out and head to the computer shop. You’ll probably find it’s held in with plastic “rivet” things - find the edge of the smooth end and work in a small screwdriver, fingernail or smal blade to pop out the core. Then you can pull the thing out for re-use later.

Probably 98% of all case fans are 80 mm, but there are also 92 and 120 mm sizes out there.

As for plugs, the “2-pin header” is probably most common, after that is 3-pin (the third provides a speed signal to motherboards that may or may not report fan speeds) and there’s a fairly rare 4-pin that plugs into a drive power connector off the power supply. Whichever you have, they’re one-way plugs, but if you force them, it is possible to get them backwards.

A case fan will probably set you back $10-15.

On re-read - you say “main fan” - is that the fan internal to the power supply? If so, you’ll need a new power supply. Step carefully here as a lot of Dells have unique components. PC Power & Cooling can tell you which you have.

4

mhendo,
You will get definitive answers to question like this one about your 8300 fan at the Dell Dimension forum. Post there and you will get step-by-step advice. I’ve used the many experts there to get me through many upgrades and fixes.

5

Sorry, i wasn’t very clear.

No, it wasn’t the PS fan, but the CPU fan. Which is good, because Dell’s proprietary power supply costs more than $90, instead of the $30-50 you pay for a good, non-proprietary power supply.

Anyway, thanks for the replies, folks. The reason i haven’t posted for so long is that the computer has been out of commission. Here’s what happened.

I took it to the local computer geek store, because the biggest concern for me right now is getting the thing up and running quickly, as i have a bunch of work to do and all my work is on this computer (Note: i do have backups of everything on DVDs, but working on this stuff without my computer would require going up to campus and using the computer labs—a PITA. My wife and her laptop are currently in New York, so using her computer would be out too).

The guys at the computer store, who are all very nice, pointed out to me fact that my Dell and, by the looks of it, many Dell desktops, have proprietary fans with power connectors that are different from most regular fans. The normal connectors look like this, a little rectangluar plug thing that attaches to connectors on the motherbgoard. But the Dell connector is much smaller, and slots into a socket on the mother board. Neither the local geekstore, nor CompUSA, had fans with power connectors that would work on my computer. The connector on a Dell cooling fan looks somthing like this.

So, the first thing the guy tried to do is take the connector off my Dell fan and attach it to the wires coming from a new fan. But apparently this didn’t work. There was some sort of problem with the connection, and he couldn’t get the fan to power up.

So what he did then was put in a fan with a regular connector and, using an adapter, hooked it directly into the power supply, rather than into the motherboard. This is obviously a less-than-ideal solution in some ways but right now it’s working fine.

The problems with the current solution are:

a) Every time i start the computer, i get a warning about fan failure, because the fan is not connected to the motherboard. So when i start up, i then have to hit F1 to ignore the warning. The guy at the computer store said that there may be a way to get rid of this warning using in the BIOS, but he couldn’t find anything.

b) Because it is not being controlled by the motherboard, this new fan is on all the time, rather than turning on and off as needed by the computer. This is no real problem for me, because in summer the fan was almost always on anyway, and also this new fan is so much quieter than the one that was in there before that i can hardly hear it. The original fan was one of the loudest i’ve ever heard on a computer.

c) If, for some reason, this new fan fails, i won’t get any warning, because it is running directly off the PS rather than off the motherboard.

With this last concern in mind, i was wondering if anyone could recommend a decent (preferably free) utility for monitoring CPU temperature. I know that Pentium CPUs are designed to shut down if they get too hot (and before they fry), so it probably won’t be a problem, but it would still be nice to be able to keep an eye on the CPU temp. Even better, i would like to be able to set it to turn off, or at least warn me, when a certain temperature is reached.

I might order a new fan from Dell and put it in at some stage, but for now at least i can get my work done.

By the way, the total cost of getting it fixed today, parts and labor, was $29, which i thought was pretty damn good.