My 13 year old daughter tells me her Dell CPi D266XT "just quit working". "Dad I don't know what's wrong with it". After I sat down to look at it I noticed what looked like water under the keyboard. That's when she admitted it was the victim of a dropped bottle of water across the keyboard. Needless to say the mobo was fried. I bought a used one off Ebay and thought all was well after I swapped em. It booted and operated normally as it did before the "Evian mineral bath". I picked it up and noticed the case under the cpu was rather warm. That's when I noticed the cooling fan wasn't running. I immediately shut it off. I tried switching fans from her original board and it would not work either. It seems to me the chance of both fans being bad are slim. I know my next question is as newbie as you can get. Do these fans run all the time when powered up or do they turn on intermittently like a car's radiator fan. I was afraid to leave it on for fear of cooking the processor. Like I stated before the motherboard I bought off Ebay was sold as a used item so I don't know if the fan circuit has power. The laptop works just fine but I only run it for a minute or so and then shut it off to let it cool. Is there any way that I could check the fans to see if they are both bad? Am I looking at an expensive fix if it is a problem on the board? Any help would be appreciated.

Almost all laptop fans act just like the fan in a car. They come on when they need to. You might want to check in the CMOS/BIOS though for a setting that will allow the fan to be "always on" some have this option, some don't. All laptops get hot. I've worked with some that you could no longer work with it on your lap because of the heat it displaced. I know you don't want to do further harm but I would let it run for a few and use it. If the CPU does get to the point it is overheating the system will either power itself off, reboot or do other funky things but it should not kill the CPU. Takes a lot of heat to kill a mobile processor. KTTD