Guide to High Pitched Noise/Whine in Pavillions

Hey all,

I recently went back to Vista because I wanted to give it another try, so I installed Vista Business with drivers from the HP website, and I got the high pitched noise problem. I have gathered here the best solutions along with one I just tried and found to work well.

The problem mainly resides with the various sleep states (C1, C2, C3, C4, C4E) for the Core family CPUs. The whine comes after a sleep state of C2 STOP. It varies for different people, probably depending on the BIOS and CPU revision, but it usually comes from the deep sleep state of C4 and C4E. This is why for the majority of people, the noise goes away when the CPU is busy.

1.) Disabling Power Save for USB Hub.

Go to "Device Manager"
Expand "Universal Serial Bus controllers"
Select any (the first is fine) "USB Root Hub" and double click on it
Go to the "Power Management" tab and uncheck the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

The idea is that this should prevent the system from going into a deep sleep state. This did not work for me as it was already disabled. I found that if I enabled it and then disabled it, the whine will only go away for a minute or so.

2. RighMark CPU Clock (RMClock) Utility's HLT command

Download and install RMClock version 2.25
Go to the Settings tab and enable it to run at startup
Go to Management to enable "Run HLT command when OS is idle"
Note: Might also want to under volt your CPU while you are at it

The idea is basically that RMClock has a utility which will prevent the CPU from going into a deeper sleep when idle. This utility takes all the idle CPU and puts them into a HLT state (C1), so in your Task Manager, it will always say 100% CPU Usage because whatever free CPU resource that is free will be grabbed by the utility. This works just fine for almost everyone, but the problem is that it prevents you from going into a sleep state deeper than C1, so it will tend to use more battery and run a bit hotter, so undervolting your CPU is recommended.

3.) Disable deep sleep states


While doing some research, I found that other Intel Core laptops had the same problem. I found a thread for a Dell laptop. The nice thing about it was the Dell's BIOS is that it lets you choose which sleep state to enable. He found that he only gets the problem in C3 and C4 states.

While RMClock lets you disable C1 (C1E in RMClock) through C4 (C4E) in the "Advanced CPU Settings", you cannot change the C4E (Hard C4E). But using BIOS F.16 (the coolest running BIOS in any case), you can disable that state in the BIOS. So with that state disabled and RMClock's HLT command disabled, I don't get the whine anymore and my task manager works normally. I am also assuming this is better because my CPU can still go to deep sleep states besides just C1, so it should run cooler and consume less battery.

I hope this helps,
Ruibing

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=138778&page=2&highlight=s96s+owners+lounge

end of page my settings. IF u go to RMCLOCK forums, they have new version out(not sure if it beta) but that is what i use now. Works good to remove significant amount of noise. Beware, this trial ends and i think it is about $20 to buy.

 

Yeah, looking at your screenshots, it seems to have more options than 2.25.

The newest version is actually 2.30 RC4, here's the link to the release. My way works for now so I don't want to change it yet, but if anyone finds the other working better, please tell me.

Update: It expires September 1st, 2007, so I would try it with 2.25 first.

 

Some say that when u plug in a USB device, the noise goes away(this worked for me when i was USING XP, doesn't work in vista for me)

 

On my dv6426us I turned off the C4 option in the BIOS and the noise went away totally.

I am probably giving up a tiny bit of battery when my CPU is idle like reading this page but I am on battery maybe 10-15% of the time. From my house on my desk with a monitor to various contracting gigs I usually use AC if I know I am going to be somewhere for more than an hour.

I tried the USB deal...did not help at all. I tried the RMclock deal as well with some settings that did not blast the CPU at 100% and that reduced the whine about 80% of the time.

This effects a lot of brands, HP, Dell, IBM, Toshiba, even Apple. Just google "CPU whine" and see what you get.

 

I haven't done a detailed battery life comparison between C4E enabled and disabled, but comparing with it disabled in Vista and enabled in XP, I get about the same battery run time, so I don't think it is that noticeable.