Chirping Noise from M4600?!

Actually, when you say chirping, does electrical whizzing/weening noises count?

If it is, it's probably what zoogle was saying. My UL20 makes a somewhat audible noise like that all the time and my E6420 makes a lower, but similar class of noise. From what I remember reading, it's a common problem with newer generation laptops because they keep changing CPU states to save power. I suppose you could always try to floor the CPU or make the minimum CPU speed 100% in the power management and turn off any speedstep settings (not sure if you can do that on a laptop) and see if it stops making the noise.

 

Thats a good idea. But it did not help. I witched speedstep off in the bios and used the notebook a complete day. Same as bevore. Sometimes this strange noise. I don't think less often than before.

However, changing this chirp noise to fan noise wuld not be a good deal...

 

Maybe there's a cricket trapped in your laptop.

 

This has been happening on my M4600 too. I'm using a HDD so I suppose the sound is not from the HDD even if the sound does come from around the area.

Strange thing is it only comes on when I use power battery saver or high performance battery plan, but goes away when I use balanced plan.

 

I finally succeeded to record the noise. One with HDD build in, one with SSD build in.

The microphone has not that high quality as I thought. So I filtered out low frequencies to reduce noise.

Some points about the noise:
- in the audio files it is not as penetrating as it is in reality. Might be due to the high frequency (about 8 kHz). I think not every speaker is able to play it back. If I listen to the sound file it is nearly relaxing compared to the original noise.
- it's much louder if the ssd is build in
- there is also a whistling noise when the ssd is build in, but I did not succeed to record it
- not the volume is the main problem of the noise is the problem. it's so damn penetrating. I even hear it if I listen to music or anything.

I would not call this a WORKstation...

 

If it's the high pitched screeching in the background, yeah, that's the noise my UL20FT sorta makes. My E6420 also makes this sometimes but to a far lesser degree. It's not very audible on my E6420, particularly if there's a bit of ambient noise, but it's noticeable in a very quiet environment.

It's probably a VRM under certain draw conditions. Not sure you can do much about it short of bug Dell and see if they would swap out the motherboard or something (though that might be asking for trouble if you could still return it).

 

The question is: Will it help to swap the part? Or is it a general problem?
I heard, that on a Lenovo notebook dropping a bit glue on a coil helped.

Actually I don't hear it any more since a few hours. But I don't want to be glad to early. Might be the noise comes back after reboot. Might be I've gone insane. Might be the cricket is dead.