The past few days, the laptop has been plagued with performance issues, spotty network connectivity, and a few other issues that have been getting gradually worse, so I decided to look into the matter today. Everything with the OS and all of the software looked ok, with nothing amiss in the event logs, but I did notice that the top of the keyboard was slightly warmer than usual, and I also noticed that the fan was in "quiet mode", and so I couldn't hear it. I could feel warm air coming out from the exhaust ports, but it seemed warm, not hot, so I wasn't all that concerned. But I DID want to know what the various temps were, just to be absolutely certain, so I installed SpeedFan, which is a temperature monitoring/fan control app (for those who didn't already know), and I was rather shocked to find that the CPU temp was sitting at 55°C! While that's not unusual for a slightly overclocked desktop unit on a hot day, it's WAY too hot for an entry level laptop. At this point, I noticed that SpeedFan was also showing that the fan wasn't running at all (or was incorrectly reporting 0 RPM, perhaps), and I still couldn't hear it, so I shut down and let the thing cool off. That's where I am now. I'll boot the laptop up in a while, and listen for the fan to kick in during the boot process (it always jumps to "high" for a second, right at the beginning of booting up). If no fans, it's time to create a "blow box", to keep it cool till I can take it apart and see what's happening.

I HATE doing surgery on laptops!

Reminds me of when in the early 80s I heard that people used a chilled carton of milk to keep their ZX81s cool :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

I've good news and bad news.

The good news is that the fan is fine, and there's no "fluff" clogging up the works.

The bad news is that the fan controller is shot.

I've taken a bit of white wall paneling and an 80mm case fan, and created an external cooler to mate up with the laptop's exhaust port. So far, so good, the comp's running at around 90°F (32°C), and it's been doing so for over an hour now. So I'm happy.

I thought about that, but that will require taking the thing apart again, which I don't want to do.

This might help, there are quite a lot of videos on Youtube that show you how to take apart different types of laptops, might be worth a little look for your model Dave.

I guess you have looked in the BIOS at the fan controller settings, is there an option to turn off the speed controller and just have it full on, or is the fan turned off even.

It is a pain but rest assure, you can do it