Someone has offered to send me his old Compaq Presario 3000 - model 3045US laptop. The main obstacle to doing so is that the fan has seized and he can't figure out how to access the fan to clean or replace it. He is pretty knowledgeable and has already done some checking: "I found several documents that were close, but not exact. Some were useless because they did not describe how to take it apart, others because they did not match close enough."
If you know how to do this, please let me know and I'll pass the information on to him. I posted a similar question to a PC hardware group a few days ago but so far I haven't gotten any replies.
The reason the fan is such a big problem is that as soon as the machine overheats it conks out, and it doesn't take very long for this to happen after turning it on.