M1530 wont be quiet

Hey, my 1530 will not stop making noise. Its like its working on somthing but there is really nothing running. I have 2 windows open, mozilla and itunes and the activity light will not shut off, and i can hear it. Whats going on with it and how can i fix it?

Thank you

 

Is it the Hard Drive you are hearing or the fan? Since you mentioned the activity light, I'm going with hard drive -

Go into your BIOS and under Performance ---> HDD Acoustic Mode

set it to PERFORMANCE

I know what you might think, Performance means its going to be noisy. Most people find it actually is quieter. I have the 320GB 7200RPM (Seagate Casey) and I can hardly hear it at all (set to Performance in BIOS).

As for the activity light being on all the time, depends on what you have running. Could just be the OS (vista?) doing its ol' cache updates, auto defrag, indexing, etc.

 

Ok so i went into the bios and set it to performance. Same thing, its just goin nuts. I think it should be quiet for being 2 days old. Im thinking of doing another fresh install of vista 64 again. Would that possibly help?

 

Have you checked Vista's Task Manager? Verify nothing funky is going on in your processes... If it's a new install, Vista might just be indexing... I'd say give it a couple of days and see what happens.

You might also want to take a look at BlackViper's Tweak Guide and Services Configuration page http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm. He has some useful info on Superfetch and so forth...

If your gut is telling you something is wrong though - give Support a call. If that doesnt help, you can always return it and have them send you a new one if you don't want to mess with it. Sucks I know, but you want to feel comfortable with your purchase...

 

its probably superfetch and indexing and all that stuff. When i got mine it was doing that for a good week or 2, now its pretty quiet. I honestly think its a vista thing

 

ok i dunno if this is part of the problem or not. i ran defrag at about 2:30 this morning. It is now 10 am and its still not done.

 

Is this the first time you are defrag'ing?

In any case, the windows builtin defrag is pretty slow (it happened to me too!) I suggest using JKdefrag... http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/index.html

It worked so well and pretty quick and its a defrag/optimize tool. There are lots of options you can use as well, thought the default one is just as good as it is.

 

well you could always call dell about it, if you are experiencing slow performance, specially when moving files, or you computer freezes just like that, it could be that your HD is having issues.

BUT, it could just be vista doing its thing, IF it doesn't bother you too much then i suggest you wait some time and see what happens

 

I did a system restore to yesterday and its not as bad. I already called dell on this and they gave me some bs about there being static inbetween the connections of the hd and pc. I am just gonna wait and see what happens, its not too anoying with headphones on. I do think its a little slower though.

 

ahahaahaha, they tell that to everyone having HD problems, i love dell support.

well one can only wait and see, if you are in your first 21 days of using it and you are having issues or simply not satisfied you can return it and they will send in a new one, but who wants to turn in their dearly beloved computer?

 

I know! i love my xps to death, i dont wanna return it. Yeah i am just gonna have to wait and see what happens. Still got like 19 days to go.

 

sure man, best of luck!

and be sure to keep us informed so we can help out.

 

My M1530 has the noise problem too. I just bought it from Dell refurbished outlet. It arrived completely new to me (but with a refurbished sticker, of course). I didn't any program or anything and the noise from hard drive is quite obvious, it is like a clock ticking, very annoying. In addition, the fan is gearing sometimes without any program running. I don't know what the problem is. Tried several tweaking options as mentioned in this thread, but it didn't solve the noise problem.

 

koer

Will they also give you your money back or just replace it?

 

They would have to give you your money back if its within the first 21 days. I would just send it in for a new one.

 

yeah

its a 21 day live or die experience lol

( for your laptop that is)

 

I think this may be the WD Scorpio drives... I just bought an XPS and I'm thinking about returning it for this reason alone. The clock ticking sound description is perfect. It is extremely annoying. My MacBook Pro was dead silent and used a Seagate Momentus drive... is that worth a shot or do you think it's the Dell casing?

Can you verify that your drives making the noise are Scorpio's as well?

 

I get that trashing noise a hell of a lot too, though it only seems to happen when pluggged in, or in high performance (like now its on batt and in library and its extremely quiet,

I'm starting to wonder is there something funny with it though, Its been doing all the clocking and thrashing and so on, but the day before last it suddenly screeched like it had jammed or something, scared the crap out of me, It hasn't stopped working or anything, its just the noise is ridiculous.

That coupled with the slot drive, which is LOUD! Make this a very noisy laptop.

 

Ps, Anyone now how to force vista to use only ram.

I heard pagefiling causes noise and wastes resources so I wanted to stop it.

I went in to system setup and set page file to 0 (I have 4 gigs of ram so no need for it) and thats all okay, right? nope!

Went into direct x according to it I'm still pagefiling 800 mb's.
Which is stupid because on average 2.5 gigs of ram are siting idle.

Any thoughts????

 

Have you disabled Indexing, Superfetch and automatic defrag?

These are main causes of disk thrashing..

 

- Turned off indexing immeadiatly when I got it.
- Not sure what superfetch is,
- And looking at the auto defrag its only supposed to happen on a wednesday morning So?

Nb, I thought indexing was merely vista's way of finding things slightly quicker (regardless of whether it works or not) But since I've turned it off, The find option can't find anthing, even simple folders on the desktop
I have to use ctrl+alt+enter for it to actually look.

 

Can you all verify WHICH hard drive you are using? I have the WD Scorpio - I'm going to try putting in a Seagate Momentus like my MacBook has to see if there's an improvement.

 

I have disabled superfetch and it seems to have made it quite a lot quieter.

Does this have an impact on the system performance? And surely this must be an issue on all Notebooks not just DELL ones if it is a thing within Vista?

 

It seems??

And btw, I have Superfetch ON and I don't have any issues with it being ON.. and FWIW, SuperFetch is a nice thing to have....

 

Well I said "seems" because I had only powered it on for like 5 minutes. lol.

With it on the noise isn't as bad as some people say to be honest. You can't really hear it unless you are focusing on it. Im usually listening to music or something lol.

Out of interest have you done a fresh install of Vista or are you using the Dell one? I haven't bothered to do a clean install yet.

 

^ Are you asking me? or the some other poster before me?

Anyway, if it was directed to me, No, I didn't do the clean install. I am with Dell and perfectly happy with it, mainly because there was nothing as such that I felt was "bloatware". As for the MD, I left it as it is, since my mom (when she was here) used to watch movie' n such and I just showed her the md thing.. she was happy since she has no exp. with computers as such... and I did No big tweaks too, just turned off Indexing.. everything else pretty much the same. some services switched to manual instead of automatic (followed blackviper)... do regular maintenance, have NIS '09, and ~5 months on..

And to be honest, even before I did this (had the system as shipped for a week or two to see how things are), I have never had any annoying hard disk noise as being posted here by others... I don't know why though, but everything has been fine.

 

To be fair any HDD noise i've had is only what you would expect from one. The sounds aren't wierd or anything, anybody who is around computers a lot in general will know the sounds a HDD makes.

I too have stayed with the Dell install and found it to be fine. There was hardly anything to remove. Easily the best factory install I have seen on a laptop. On previous Dell's they used to pack them with so much crap, this didn't have any type of networking assist or anything which is great

I've had no problems with my XPS, the HDD sound isn't there as much without superfetch, but when it is it isn't something that bothers me. I just tried it without out of curiosity but I think I am going to turn it back on.

 

I get this, too. It's a sporadic clock ticking sound that gets magnified in quiet environments like the library.

Here's hoping that SSD technology comes into the consumer's price range soon!