Chirp / Minor problems with the 1420?

Hi all,

Just bought a new Inspiron 1420 from Staples at decent price with a gift card. I loved it... great size, keyboard, and screen... until I plugged in my headphones. I had to immediately return this first one I bought because of snap-crackle-pop static in the headphone jacks, happening even when the system volume was muted, and especially bad when my finger was on the touchpad. Staples was great -- I received a new one a day later... this one still had static in the jacks, but with a slightly more tolerable "background noise" volume to the static and with a little bit less popping and cracking. I figured, since I liked everything else about the machine, I would just keep it and deal with it... perhaps pick up some USB headphones.

But now the new computer has a consistent chirping or perhaps "tinking" sound coming from the right (optical drive, heat sink, and fan) side at random but frequent intervals, especially when the hard drive is idle. I don't think it is the hard drive, because the sound happens when the hard drive is idle (although the hard drive has been tick-tick-ticking a lot when I am not doing much...), and the hard drive light does not flash when the sound is heard. It is a soft sound, but its high pitch and every-minute-or-so-appearance makes it distinctly noticeable. Dell Chat told me that the fan is faulty, meaning that I need to exchange the machine at Staples again.

Are there decent versions of the 1420 out there? Do most owners have these problems and just live with them (jack static and soft chirping... (I feel like I am in a woodland scene?))? Perhaps I should not be buying from a retailer, but rather directly from Dell?

Even though I love the look and feel of the 1420, I will feel pretty foolish if I exchange and then return a third version of the same computer, especially if they all seem to have these minor problems. I just don't want to dish out nearly a thousand bucks for a problem-plagued system. Wondering if I should start looking at other brands... Any feedback would be greatly appreciated (excluding the stuff in my jacks, of course).

 

Actually that noise is the hard drive's head parking. It is completely normal to hear. As for the audio jacks, yeah its annoying but there is a fix for it on this forum.

 

So almost everyone has the chirp and just ignores it or runs NHC and changes the performance settings to eliminate it?

In addition, constant re-parking of the head (sometimes the chirps occur more than once a minute... on average at least once every two) over hours of computer use might not indicate any problems with the HD?

And the Dell Chat guy was just way off base when he said the sound on the right hand side when the HD is idle is probably a faulty fan? (obviously he could not hear it...)

Sorry to pepper the forum with questions... I just am trying to decide whether to keep this machine and ignore the problem or use an end-user solution like NHC (I've got ten days to return/exchange it), and I guess I may be a bit of a perfectionist/cyberchondriac.

 

I get the hard disk parking noise as well, and use NHC to silence it. I would highly recommend silencing that as constant parking of the drive can surely not be good!

As far as noise on the headphone port goes there is a thread here showing a DIY to fix it (basically it's interference from the notebook casing).