So around two years ago I decided to retire my then ~8 year old Toshiba laptop (Vista), and I bought a "cheap" HP 15-r132something. The laptop came with Windows 8, and other than it having a lot of useless features the OS worked fine for me. And then Windows 10 came.

Being the curious cat that I am, I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 before the free upgrade was discontinued. After the upgrade, the computer showed some minor/annoying issues with the brightness settings being fucked up or the touchpad settings not saving after a shut down and such. Annoying, but ignorable.

Then I decided to play Torchlight/Hearthstone on it. The laptop tended to crash when playing any of those games and I just attributed it to overheating. I did find it odd that the laptop would overheat so easily when I was running stuff like Portal/DS2 in my 8 year old laptop, so I opened the thing up and that's when I noticed that the laptop had no fan in it. A ~$500 machine from 2014 has no cooling fan. I didn't even know that was a thing. I thought a fan was indispensable, kinda like how a car is expected to have a radiator fan.

So, no games for me. I switch hobbies from playing games to just browsing reddit and looking at memes and then it happens again. The computer hangs and no amount of ctrl alt del will budge the thing. But since it only happens once every few weeks I choose to ignore it. Until a few weeks ago.

The crashes increased in frequency to the point that it would happen 3-4 times in a single day for no discernible reason. I finally get around to running the uefi component tests and the HD fails it. Fuck. In a bid of desperation I back up some of the files I've been using the most and decide to attempt a clean reinstall. I mean, maybe it's just Windows 10 being a bitch? Maybe the system files were corrupted since the time I upgraded to Windows 10?

Well after deleting/formatting all partitions, the Windows 10 installation spitted out an error about certain files not being available and then I was left with a fucked up HD and no OS installed. Thankfully I had my trusty Toshiba handy and managed to install Ubuntu into the fucked up HD. I ran the smart test on the disk again and apparently, the disk fails the Airflow Temperature assessment. Well, what a coincidence.

So now the question is, is the HD fucked? Or is the fact that the computer has no fan fucking with the HD? If I buy a new HD, will the computer with no fan fuck the new HD up again? Why did my re-installation of Windows 10 fail when Ubuntu installed with no problem? And why the fuck are companies manufacturing laptops with no fucking fan when just browsing reddit will cause them to overheat?

tl;dr - When buying laptops, make sure it has a cooling fan.