Changing the fan/heatsink on the ThinkPad X60

This guide will teach you how to replace the fan and heatsink on your ThinkPad X60.

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Table of Contents

Hardware requirements

Software requirements (for CPU stress testing)

Disassembly

Remove those screws:

Push the keyboard forward (carefully):

Lift the keyboard up and disconnect it from the board:

Grab the right-hand side of the chassis and force it off (gently) and pry up the rest of the chassis:

You should now have this:

Disconnect the wifi antenna cables, the modem cable and the speaker:

Unroute the cables along their path, carefully lifting the tape that holds them in place. Then, disconnect the modem cable (other end) and power connection and unroute all the cables so that they dangle by the monitor hinge on the right-hand side:

Disconnect the monitor from the motherboard, and unroute the grey antenna cable, carefully lifting the tape that holds it into place:

Carefully lift the remaining tape and unroute the left antenna cable so that it is loose:

Remove those screws:

Remove those screws:

Carefully remove the plate, like so:

Remove the SATA connector:

Now remove the motherboard (gently) and cast the lcd/chassis aside:

Look at that black tape above the heatsink, remove it:

Now you have removed it:

Disconnect the fan and remove all the screws, heatsink will easily come off:

Remove the old paste with a cloth (from the CPU and heatsink) and then clean both of them with the alcohol (to remove remaining residue of the paste). Apply a pea-sized amount of paste to the both chipsets that the heatsink covered and spread it evenly (uniformally). Finally reinstall the heatsink, reversing previous steps.

stress -c 2 command can be used to push the CPU to 100%, and xsensors (or watch sensors command) can be used to monitor heat. Below 90C is ok.

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Leah Rowe <info@minifree.org>
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