Audio still getting weird occasionally on T400

Every so often, the audio card seems to go wacky on my in my T400. I reported this before, nobody said they had experienced it, I believe; but it just happened again.

I start hearing static, a distorted signal, all kinds of weird sounds like the sound hard (or speaker connections, possibly?) is having difficulties.

I wanted to check for a driver problem, so I rebooted to Ubuntu, and the problem wasn't there. I then rebooted to Windows, and it was gone there too.

I may have jostled the laptop while doing this, however. I *seem* to recall this happening in Ubuntu before, too, which would point to a hardware problem.

So far, tho, I can't tell if it is:

1. A driver issue
2. Bad internal connection/bad speakers/etc.
3. Semi-broken audio card
4. Electrical condition the audio card gets into (static build up, for instance)

I don't want to go through the hassle of sending it in to Lenovo (I need it very much for work), and it's only annoying, not detrimental to the computer as a whole, but I really would love to know what could be causing this, and if anyone else has seen this ever.

- Tim

 

I would try to reinstall the audio driver in Windows. Rule out the software/driver thing first. If it still acts up then call Lenovo and ship it in while you still have a warranty. It's a hassle but you're lucky it's happening under warranty.

 

I'll have to wait for it to happen (or not) again to be sure. Given that the sound is working *most* of the time, I doubt it would be something a reinstall could fix, do you?

- Tim

 

This happened to me on my T61. Make sure you don't have anything disabled in the security section of the BIOS that lets you turn off various ports and components like bluetooth, modem, wan, etc. I had a whole bunch of things disabled there and the audio would be terrible.

Enabling everything there helped but didn't fix it completely. I'm not sure what did, but I don't have the problem anymore.