NX6110 High Pitched Buzzing

Hello,

I just bought an HP NX6110. A very nicely equipped machine for the price... with one small but very annoying problem.

If it's running on batteries and I plug in a USB mouse I can hear a high pitched buzzing/squeal from the top left part of the keyboard area. When the machine is doing something like installing and update, the sound becomes intermittent. If I run Winamp on mute, the sound goes away completely... which leads me to believe it's something to do with CPU frequency scaling.

Unplugging the device makes the noise stop almost immediately. I have tried plugging in my iRiver music player to see if the same thing occurs. No noise. I have also tried a USB mouse in Ubuntu Linux. No noise.

I have seen some posts in other threads with similar machines having problems that were eventually resolved by changing the power settings for the USB ports in Window's Device Manager. Those who tried this solution have reported battery life decreased by roughly 45 minutes, which is not a very good solution in my opinion.

I don't have the laptop with me to test solutions tonight; the techs in the shop where I bought the laptop are looking at it. If they cannot fix the problem they will exchange the laptop for me.

HP online chat support said try Windows Update and new drivers. Didn't help. They couldn't solve it. HP phone support recommended doing an exchange at the shop first and sending it to HP for diagnosis if I couldn't do that.

So, any suggestions? Anybody else have this experience? Is this common to all HP laptops, or just some batches? Perhaps I have a bad one.

 

Okay, they're going to do an exchange for me. The new one is on its way. We'll see if it's all NX6110's or just mine... since nobody as responded saying "me too!" I assume it's just mine.

Can anybody with an NX6110 confirm that they are NOT having this problem? Please!?

 

Does it sound like a high pitched "static" sound? On mine, the noise is there when the cpu is idle. But If I throw at it something to encode, or run BOINC (SETI software), the noise completely goes away.

When I lower the voltage/clock on mine, noise goes away completely, idle or full throttle. It doesn't bother me though. All the laptops I've had in this household did it except my aunts new ibm.

 

Treat,

Does the problem go away if you insert a USB memory key/drive into the USB port on the left of the computer? If so, this is generally a known problem with Centrino based notebooks (not all, but a lot). It has to do with a capacitor or restistor that is vibrating due to the amount of power flowing through it (that's what HP's engineers told me). This high pitched squeel is also happening to my HP nx8220, but goes away if I turn Bluetooth on.

Other things you can try to eliminate the noise is changing your Power Management settings as well as your USB Power Management Settings in Device Manager.

For the USB settings, goto the Device Manager -> USB Controllers -> Properties of the Root Hubs -> Power Management -> 1st Check Box (Allow the computer to turn off....)

Just uncheck the box for each root hub and see if it helps with the noise, or insert a USB memory drive into the USB port. These are currently the only things that have helped in some cases.

Good Luck!

-Vb-