Fan control issue confirmed
At this point I can confirm the fan control issue as raised by numerous websites, the L400 with the A09 bios cannot regulate the fan properly and gives false readings (ACPI temperature at 50C). See for example this thread.
Confirmed because the behaviour of the fan I’ve put in is just as good/bad as with the original, even though this fan lacks the yellow cable = rpm readings and whatnot. This is good in the sense that it doesn’t run the fan a lot, bad in that it may overheat and shut down or run the fan constantly making the user shut down instead… I wouldn’t do any critical work on the L400 and whatever work you do do needs to be backed up frequently.
It is rumoured that the A03 bios may restore some or all functionality and I will be testing this within a week… stay tuned 
Earlier Dell bioses avaible from their FTP here.
In other news; the Addonics adapter has arrived and is confirmed to be working (New 2gb 80x card works, old 512 and 256mb cards refuse to work properly), now I’m just waiting for a bigger and better 4Gb 133x Transcend cf-card to arrive.
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- Linux on Dell L400
- BIOS downgrade /fails/ WORKS!
- Fan control issue confirmed
- 40mm fan working in the L400!
- Cooling examined 2
- Cooling examined
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Great work!.
I have l400 that has been sitting in the basement, I Just orderd a cf to ide adapter from newegg, Total was 18$. Will buy a 8gb cf card 266x to run win2k.
Few questions, Is there any better speaker that can be installed in place of the orignal?
And any mod for installing more memory?
Thanks! Speakerwise I haven’t gone to the trouble of actually researching a replacement, judging by the size of the speaker compartment really anything you put in there will more or less have to sound the same. I could be wrong but I think it’s not worth effort (I even put the old one back in).
Memory – I’m afraid not. Hardware limitation in the chipset if I remember right, and also not a single report of anything more than 256mb to be found on intertubes… I use XP and find it quite workable with 256mb, for writing and other easy tasks that is. Going to try an nLited version on the cf to reduce read/write operations, and also a Linux distro or two.
Good luck with resurrecting your L400!