I have had my macbook pro 13-inch for about 2 years now. It’s been running very well until recently, it randomly freezes. The keyboard and mouse would not respond and I would be forced to do a hard restart. After a few incidences, I noticed that this often happens when I am watching a youtube video or any long videos on VLC. At first I thought it was some corrupt libraries in the kernel and so I re-installed osx, but the problem remains. Then I clicked around, trying to investigate… to my horror, it was actually that my cpu fan stopped spinning!
I have attached a picture here. This software is called “iStat” btw. The cpu fan is spinning at 2000 rpm, which is good. This is after I replaced the fan. Before the replacement, it was at 0 rpm. The cpu temperature was going up to 90 degrees in fahrenheit.
I did try to clean up my old fan, but it still didn’t spin. See pic below. So it could be that it just died. Well too bad, I got another fan on ebay for about $15.
Replacing the cpu fan is fairly simple. All it takes is to unscrew the bottom screws from the case, then 3 more screws to remove the fan. Be careful with the small socket on the motherboard, coz it’s very easy to drag that along with the fan cable/plug. I recommend to use something small enough to press on the small outer socket, then use a needle tip to lift up the plug. After the removal, just reverse the process to install the new fan.
Now my macbook pro is working perfectly fine again! My cpu temperature is now at 45 degrees.