Grr! (Cooling pad failure)

[Kasey Chang]

I have a cooling pad for my laptop as my previous laptop cooked itself while playing Borderlands (1). In fact, I have a cooling pad AND an extractor side fan. Last night (or is it this morning?) something started making a very bad noise. I concluded it's the cooling pad. It has the 3 original fans on a rheostat plus 2 extra fans I picked up from a Coolermaster sale way back when. This is one of those pads with fans that can be repositioned. Turns out, out of the 5 fans, 1 is dead, and 1 is making that awful racket (eek-ack eek-ack). I cut the cord and extracted each. Turns out the fans are just your run of the mill 5V 80x80x10 fan, in a fancy snap-in bracket. And one of the remaining three may be about to go too. I got some WD40 into the slightly squeeky one and it seems okay now, but who knows how long that'd last.

Then I checked the prices online for 2 replacements. DANG! Unless I go eBay with vendors out of China (which gets here in 2-3 weeks), expect to pay $8-10 EACH. And a lot of those are actually 12V fans as they expect to go in a computer case. The ones off eBay are far more reasonable... $2.50 to 3.00 each, and "free shipping". But picking a reliable vendor is problematic. I think I can wait a little longer by repositioning the fans in the meanwhile.

Anyone know of more reasonably priced source for 80x80x10mm 5V fans in the US? Don't need the USB connector, but would be nice to have if it made little to no difference in price. If not, I'll just wait for eBay to refresh inventory and pick one of those Top Vendors.