PC Fan

One of our home PC's fans is really noisy. It's squeaking and needs to be replaced. I tried spraying some WD-40 in there but it didn't help. So I found this place on the web—The Fan Van—that specializes in cooling solutions. It sounds like some college student that mails out PC fans when he gets a chance to get to the post office (twice a week or something like that). Anyway, he sells the fans cheap, the fan arrived as expected, so all that's good. I was all excited about swapping out the fan. Above you can see inside the PC, the shot on the right with the fan exposed at top. Replacing the fan is fairly simple, it just snaps in place and connects to the motherboard with one three-wire connection.

My excitement was short-lived, however. Turns out I ordered the wrong fan. The one I got is an 80 mm fan, 10 mm too small. That 10 mm makes a huge difference since the fan attaches to four little posts at the fan corners. I'm not quite sure what to do now...The Fan Van doesn't have the exact fan model number that I need and I don't know where else to look. This PC happens to be fairly old now, maybe that's part of the problem. Anyway, I emailed The Fan Van guy; hopefully he might be able to suggest something. Meanwhile, for the moment I'm stuck with a fan that I can't really use. For reference, here are the specs of the machine/fan in question:

Dell Precision 420 (service tag: GFQ2K01)
JMC/DA-TECH fan model 0925-12HBTA (12V, 0.6A), 90mm (Dell part no. 6985R)