Just replaced the fan on my laptop

For a couple of months my macbook's fan has been a bit on the fritz. Sometimes when the CPU got a bit hot it started making some noises and once in a while stopped working completely.

The repair would most likely cost me about 100€ (50 for the fan, 50 for replacing it), so I decided to look up if anyone sold those. Thankfully a store in Hong-Kong does, and they ship international (they're called eeshop). It took a while to get here (a month and a half, perhaps) but for 10€ that's not a big issue. I did ask after a while if it was supposed to take so long, and answer was prompt (apparently the postal office was swamped).

Opening the laptop was another issue. First attempt failed when some of the screws were a bit too small for the screwdrivers I was using, so today I went and bought a new set with a better grip. After removing the screws, I just had to take care to remove the connection for the trackpad and slide the keyboard left to remove it. Opening it gave me access to the internals as you can see on the left. Replacing the fan was a matter of just removing the connector, two screws and taking it off. The right screw was hidden under some cables, but gently pulling them off gave me access to remove it.

I do have to say, putting it all back again was a bit difficult, since on the right hand there are some "hooks" that you need to slide the keyboard plate into, and that wasn't trivial. Other than that it was easy.

And now my laptop doesn't scream anymore when hot! And it cost me just about 15€ plus an hour and a half. Yay.

I wish I could put 4gb of ram on my macbook...

According to an article on cnet Snow Leopard boots by default into a 32-bit kernel and mentions that macbooks with an older, 32-bit EFI chipset (which handles the early boot process) cannot boot the 64-bit version.

Although having a 64-bit kernel would be good, I'm more interested in the side effect of the 32-bit chipset memory limitation. The same article mentions that a 32-bit EFI chipset cannot address more than 3Gb of ram. Since most likely this is the chipset installed on my mac, I think that's the reason why 4 Gb are not supported. I wonder if the chipset could be replaced. Doubt it, since it must be soldered into the board.

Sadly, that's pretty much the largest reason I'm envious of the new macs. 2 gb isn't much, specially if you're like me and have tons of apps loaded all the time.