Broken heatsink nib on K7S5A ZIF Socket

My brother mailed me his sick PC, and either it didn't travel well via UPS,
or the original problem was immediately evident. Upon opening the case, I
found his humungous heatsink/fan rolling around free, tethered only by the
fan wire. Reason being, one of the opposing nibs on the ZIF socket, to
which the fan attaches, had broken off. So now it's like trying to put
glasses on a one-eared man. And of course, that fan assembly has to be snug
up to the elderly AMD 900 Mhz CPU lest the chip get fried up. So here's the
question - is the socket economically replaceable, or is there some sort of
commonly used bandaid (a fan with diagonally oriented opposing hooks)? Or
is brother dearest in the market for a new mobo?

"wamaruna" <wamaruna DeleteThis @cox.net> wrote in message
news:E4iWa.324$ih.96@lakeread02...

 > My brother mailed me his sick PC, and either it didn't travel well via
UPS,
 > or the original problem was immediately evident. Upon opening the case, I
 > found his humungous heatsink/fan rolling around free, tethered only by the
 > fan wire. Reason being, one of the opposing nibs on the ZIF socket, to
 > which the fan attaches, had broken off. So now it's like trying to put
 > glasses on a one-eared man. And of course, that fan assembly has to be
snug
 > up to the elderly AMD 900 Mhz CPU lest the chip get fried up. So here's
the
 > question - is the socket economically replaceable, or is there some sort
of
 > commonly used bandaid (a fan with diagonally oriented opposing hooks)? Or
 > is brother dearest in the market for a new mobo?

There is no good way to replace the socket, however, there are many models
of heatsinks that use all three tabs, instead of just the one in the middle.
These will still work perfectly fine with the middle tab gone. How do I
know, you ask? Uh, a friend of mine broke his, and got a CoolerMaster
HAC-V81. Yeah, that's it, it was a friend of mine, definately not me, it was
someone else. Why are you looking at me like that?<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->