CPU Whining Noise (T500)

I've posted this on the Lenovo forums hoping they will fix it. By any chance, has anyone here fixed this irritating issue? Thanks!


I am convinced that the irritating whining noise that my T500 is making is 100% coming from the CPU. I disabled the CPU power management thing in the BIOS and it greatly reduced the whining noise by at least 80%!!! but it is still there.

I don't know if the whining noise was there before I did the BIOS, etc updates because I updated the drivers straight away. Is there a way to downgrade the driver so that I can check if this is the case?

Thanks

 

I didn't know this was a problem in the T500 models. I had always heard about this in the T61 models. Is anyone else having this issue?

 

Hmm ... I have not noticed any whining sound.

I DID, however, notice this with a T60 model the office had some time back. But it would only start to whine when it was in battery mode. And loud too.

We sent it in to Lenovo to fix it three times - and they did so only on the third try. It may be a different thing entirely that what you are experiencing, however.

 

It's funny that you mention that. My roommate owned a Dell Inspiron and the same thing would occur. When plugged in, it was fine. When on battery power alone, however, there would be this loud and very annoying whine that would occur. It almost made it so that neither of us could stand to use the computer. She now owns a different computer (Asus), and this has not occurred.

 

From what I remember it had something to do with the wires connecting to the screen itself. But it has been a while.... This is why simply replacing the motherboard did not work.

 

AFAIK is a known problem of Intel Penry processors, and it only shows when the processors is in power saving mode, that's why the whining disappears when you plug in your AC adapter

 

So, I take it the new Montevina technology does not suffer from this shortcoming?

 

That's the thing, though. After the third time they fixed the whine. In my case it was not solely the cpu ... it was the connections to the laptop screen. (At least that is what the Lenovo tech I talked to told me.)

But as for it appearing in Montevinas ... I have not seen it yet (although admittedly my exposure to Montevina laptops has been only Dells, Lenovos and Asus'.

 

Hey Mycanid,

I think you may have mentioned something to me about this in another thread, but what do you think about Asus? My roommate got one, as I mentioned earlier, and it seems to be really nice. She's going into engineering so the machine is decked out with very good specs. I've used it just a few times, so I really don't have anything solid to base an opinion on just yet. What is your impression?

 

Asus makes very nice machines for the price, but imo the area in which they "cut the corners" is in the keyboard. I had an Asus for a while and the keyboard was so bad I actually returned it ... I have never made more mistakes typing on any other laptop or desktop keyboard in my life. This was very frustrating for me.

The battery life was also not so great - this T500 I am typing on got up to 2x the battery life and had the same processor and video card (the ati 3650). Battery life is something they also cut corners on, it seems.

BUT - if you are not persnickety about keyboards and are near a plug all the time, Asus laptops are nice in my experience.

One thing I especially like is their one year return it for a replacement whatever happens to it arrangement!

 

This is all very useful in my endeavor. Thanks again.

 

Thanks for your reply Mycanid. Do you know which BIOS version you are running?

 

The most recent ... I just downloaded and installed it about a week ago through Lenovo's System Update program.