high pitch noise at power on

some search didn't give me any good results so... I have an F3F, about a year old, when i turn it on it makes a high pitch noise, I am not sure if it comes from the hard drive, I would locate it on the bottom part of the laptop underneath the touchpad, roughly. Turn after a few minutes it disappears?

any clue what could it be?

 

Maybe it's the typical Core Duo & later CPU whine. It usually happens when the CPU is in a power-saving state, though -- maybe that's how it boots up.

 

it has been going on just for the past 2/3 weeks. and it doesn't seem to me that when in power-saving state makes that sound.

 

Yeah it's a bit unlikely.

Make sure there are no peripherals connected when you boot it up. Does it do the same sound whether you start it on battery or plugged in? Is the fan working properly?

These are shots in the dark, really, I have no idea what it could be.

 

I just opened it up. I cleaned the fan. I won't make that noise because I think it makes only when it has been turned off for a while. I don't think it is coming from the duo, it looks more from the intel video cpu. could that be possible. unfortunately i couldn't take off the whole chassis beacuse I need smaller screwdrivers.

 

I think you also need a manual. Also it's probably not something that you could fix. Maybe call service / RMA? If you think the issue is important enough...

 

just to take the whole core 2 duo posibility out try bootting you laptop with nothing attached then after windows has load entirely plug in an usb device (mouse is good) if that takes care of the sound then your CPU is affected by the theeee curse...

 

it seems that the noise at boot up disappeared and doesn't seem any peripheral made any difference. But there's also something weird going on. So when I am in mozzila, I use CTRL+TAB to cycle through the tabs. When I do 3 or 4 is fine, but when I get to the 8 or 9th tab, it starts slowing down and I can hear the HD struggle and choke and then it gets to the point where it stops on one tab for like two seconds, and then back up to speed. I used SMART but nothing is wrong, but also all the browser content should be in the RAM so I am not positive it is the hard disk that is making that noise. Maybe I should record it. I also ordered 50 blank dvd to save data.

 

Wow, 50 of them

I'd suggest getting an external HDD for backup. Much easier to use.

As to the Mozilla issue, it might just be a swapping issue. You only have 1GB RAM -- if you have Vista, I fully expect it to swap on anything more intensive than clicking the taskbar... If you have XP, it's not so likely, but still very possible depending on the applications that you have open.

Monitor your RAM usage. Also look at the Mozilla RAM usage (you can select columns in task manager). If there is a spike in used memory as it does that thing, then it's clearly swapping & allocating more memory to mozilla.

 

it happens even with two tabs. And I didn't notice any peak, it is stable around the 60,000k +/- 3,000. I have XP. any other ideas? I know ext HD is easier, faster. but it can also fail at any time, and I don't have that many GB of things I want to save, just pics and music mainly

 

DVDs can get scratched at any time. Honestly, the lifetime of a HDD is much better than DVDs these days (unless you have some really high-end DVDs and a high-end DVD writer, I don't know what those would be). It's not like in the days we wrote CDs at 2-4x and they would last 10 years...

If it doesn't do the sound except in mozilla maybe mozilla is at fault. Try reinstalling?

 

I tried with IE, it works better, still somewhat clunky, but doesn't slow down and switches at constant speed.

I have to disagree with what you said. it depends on the purpose of back-up. To me photos DVD are going on a shelf and being used rarely and being kept for years and years, maybe my children will look at those pictures in 20 years and think how ridiculous we where with dvd and ipods I know, for sure that an HDD will never last nearly as long as a dvd. if you leave it in a case on a shelf there's no way it can get scratched.

 

That's true.

Myself, I sometimes look at pictures / print them / post them, reorganize etc.

I rarely have something that just "goes to the archive" without the possibility of reorganization sometime in the future.

 

this is comming from the CPU. it is a general problem to many laptops that when the cpu steps down to C3 or C4 low power mode then it emmits that high pitch noise. I have had that to two of my laptops. Try Rm clock and enable HTT. That way you will force the cpu not to go to low power states (noisy states) but you will have an increase on cpu temperature and lower battery life.

hope that helps.

 

I am bringing this up again because I have done some testing. when running on batteries the noise goes away, but then when I was in italy with 220v it didn't make any noise. so it is probably what epaschalis said.

but it is still weird when I scroll down a page like a pdf, or thumbnails there's a lot clicking which didn't use to do. any clue on that.

 

since I realized my thread ended up in the ASUS quality below expectations, I just wanna update it. I kept having power issues when moving the laptop around. The noise kept coming up at start-up. I sent the F3F to Asus, they replaced the motherboard, hopefully with another model. It seems the noise is gone. They said the motherboard was loosing power.