hissing, freezing, when on battery..

So I'm running Vista on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61.

When on AC power, all I hear is slight fan noise and everything runs great.

Once I pull the AC plug, however, a slight and intermittent hissing noise comes out of the back left side. I realize that's where the vents are though, so perhaps the sound is originating from elsewhere else and I'm just hearing it come out of the vents. I know it's not the fan, I know it's not the HD, it *might* be the speakers but I really doubt it. I'm nearly certain it's that electronic hiss noise. The last time I heard this noise, it was comming from the capacitors on my old MSI MB before they literally blew up (popped...).

I did a little searching on this whine on-line and came up with some old dell complaints, and lots of threads about that macbook pro whining issue.. for which there seemed to be no real fix other than to keep the CPU from idling, which was the cause of their whine. This doesn't seem to be the case on my system, however, which whines intermittently no matter what I'm doing.

The real problem though is that the system locks up on battery power. within an hour of pulling the plug, the system freezes. Apps freeze, I can't get to task manager, the start menu's dead, all I can do is dance my mouse cursor around.

I'm also using an extra 1GB of Kingston ram, which I've learned can be a cause for instability on Thinkpads. If this is the culprit, however, is there a reason why the instability is only in battery mode?


anyway, anyone have any ideas?

 

have a look here?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=96295

 

also this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=90335

 

Sounds like the normal "power state changing" noise to me. Unfortunately, aside from using RMClock and the "Run HLT command when OS is idle" option (which essentially keeps the CPU from entering those one or two sleep states where the voltage regulators normally make that noise), there really isn't a way to fix it. Unless it's very loud and out of the ordinary, it's normal.

When it locks up except for the cursor, is the HDD accessing almost constantly? If it is, I may have a solution for you as I had the same problem and I figured out that it was due to a Vista hotfix that Lenovo has on their site. Should be KB929191, so you might want to check if you have that installed. To check, goto Programs & Features > and in the left tasks pane, choose "View installed updates".

Apparently this would happen when I would plug in or remove a device (external HDD, thumbdrive) and it bugged the crap out of me; since I removed that hotfix it hasn't happened again.

 

I've found that using RMClock and just disabling "popup mode" solves the noise issue without having to run HLT command. In addition, it doesnt seem to affect battery life.

 

Also make sure the ThinkVantage Active Protection is not pausing your hard drive. It is very sensitive when set to high (default) and will freeze the HDD if it detects movement.

I have the same bit of hiss when on battery. Have had it in other laptops as well though. Its not too loud, but you can hear it when in a very quiet room. Seems to settle down after awhile though. And it is from the CPU, the hiss comes from right where the CPU is.

 

wow, thanks for the speedy numerous replies. My quick search on google didn't yield any of that great information.

I suspect the hissing and the freezing are separate issues now. The hissing being a common, though not ubiquitous? symptom? and the freezing being.. well.. I'm not sure.

Either way, I ended up calling tech support and the man I talked to said he was "familiar" with the issue and offered to do a pick-up warranty service without any troubleshooting hassle.

Hopefully that means they have a fix for the problem, but only time will tell.


I don't think it was Active Protection causing the freezing. I'm using my laptop as it sits motionless on a table. Though that's a helpful bit if information to know regardless.

Also, the HD wouldn't be constantly trashing during the freezes, at least as far as I could tell. The hissing would often get louder at those times, and that's all I was thinking about.

Anyway, thanks again for the quick and informative replies : ) I hope the techs at Lenovo know what they're doing.