E6400 Whining Noises

There is an intermittent (almost rhythmic) high-pitched whining noise coming from my E6400. It is extremely hard to determine the exact location of the noise. It seems loudest on the left side of the base, but with your ear near the laptop, it is audible pretty much everywhere. It is very quiet, and I wouldn't mind it at all if I couldn't also hear the noise through the headphone jack. I have had it since I bought the machine (from the outlet a couple weeks ago). I mentioned it when I sent it to the repairs depot for overheating issues, but apparently they ignored my notes (they also ignored my third issue, a wobbling of the base).

I am running Windows XP Pro SP 3. Does anyone else have this issue? Any ideas? Can anyone listen for similar noises in their own E6400's? Just plug in some decent quality in ear monitors or headphones and let me know if you hear the noise.

Thanks

EDIT: Okay, I listened for the sound while running stress tests on the CPU and ram, and the noises change. In fact, it became clear to me that there are actually two noises, but they usually happen simultaneously, so it is hard to distinguish between them normally. One is a short, quiet squeak, the other is a longer, louder and more irritating whining noise. They latter disappears when I run the stress test. I'm not sure what this reveals. I also updated BIOS and nothing changed.

EDIT 2: The sound disappears when running when in Safe Mode w/ networking.

 

At least on of the sounds you hear is most likely the sound that is emitted when the CPU and or other system componets changes power state with Intel Speedstep. It is very common for laptops to emit a faint whining sound when this happens. One my old laptop it could clearly heard when I was browing the internet and scrolled the web page. When I scrolled the web page more processing power was needed and the CPU went to another power state causing it to emit a whining noise.

There are ways to get rid of the CPU whining noise. One my old laptop I think it went away if I disallowed the Bluetooth device to enter power-saving state.

Örjan

 

Thanks for the reply. You're absolutely right: the noise is aggravated by simply scrolling up and down web pages. I have the bluetooth device disabled, along with the wifi card. Any other possible causes or workarounds?

 

1. Call Dell support and ask them to replace the system board. The component that is whining is probably some coil, capacitor or similar on the system board. My E6400 don't have any noticeable whining noise and I haven't heard a lot of other users having problem either on this particular model.

3. Disabling bluetooth will probably not help. Enabling it might help. Basically what you need to do to get rid of the noise is to disable the power-saving feature that keeps changing the power state to a lower level. Try disabling powersaving features for a USB device. See e.g. http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service...447626+1251627939786+28353475&threadId=976936 for information on this.
Note that this workaround will decrease the battery time slightly.

Örjan

 

Is the noise coming from the speakers (you said you heard it from headphones)? Does muting the speakers make the noise go away?

Is the noise coming from the hard drive? On some drives, the seeking noise is quite noticeable, and the average motor noise can be mistaken for that of a fan.

 

If you have the Intel GPU then try disabling some of its power management features. I was also hearing a high-pitched noise coming from my machine until I disabled most of the aggressive power management features in the Intel graphics driver. It's worth a shot.

 

Set your Windows to balance mode, it should stop it.
What you hear from the headphone jack should also disappear if you unplug your system from the power plug. Can you confirm this? If so, I can explain to you why all this and can assure you that this is 100% normal for a laptop (as for the sound, this is true for desktop computer as well using integrated sound cards onto the motherboard)

 

The whining noise is audible regardless of volume level. I don't think it's the hard drive...the hard drive isn't involved in scrolling up and down a web page.

No, I can hear the sound with the laptop both unplugged and plugged to the wall.

If the problem is abnormal, I'll take it up with Dell...I'm not willing to sacrifice battery life due to a problem that shouldn't be.

Do you mean the "Power Saving Options" found in the display settings (e.g. Rapid Memory Power Management, Smart 2D Display technology)? I disabled them all, and haven't noticed a difference.

Thanks for all the responses.

How do I access the Intel Speedstep options, just to verify that the CPU's power management feature is the cause of the problem?

One unrelated question about the headphone jack...if no audio is played on the system for 30 seconds or so, hiss from the jack disappears. The moment before a sound is played after these 30 seconds, there is a short, quiet, high pitched beep and then a small amount of constant white noise. Is this typical of all Dell systems? I remember this same phenomenon occurring with a Studio 1555 I had once. It's only obvious if you are listening with good in ear monitors or other headphones in a quiet room. Can anyone test this out for me? It seems the hiss covers up most of the whining noises cited above.

 

That is the sound card that "shuts-down" to save power.

For the static you hear, lowered the value of everything AND Mute them, and Enable SRS from the sound card control panel, and make sure they are applied in Windows sound panel, both found in the Control Panel.