FZ Crashing Waves

Now that we have a poll whether your FZ makes a loud high pitched noise, here's the poll for what has been described as "crashing waves". Please comment on the loudness, duration of your FZ's fan getting confused. On my notebook it changes speeds frequently, but is also capable of going steady again. Furthermore it remains pretty quiet and doesn't seem much of a nuisance. So what peculiar habits has your FZ taken up?

 

FZ190 with Nvidia.

I don't seem to have any real problems with sound or fan.
the fan does have consistent variable speed, but its a low variable under light use, and a faster speed but still slightly variable when playing games. For the longest time, i could not notice a high pitched sound that others have. but when the house was empty, and everything in my room was off besides the laptop absolutely no sound at all other than the laptop, i can just faintly hear a light high pitched sound, but i really have to tune in to hear it, its definitly not something i am remotely bothered by or something louder than anything I've ever heard in a laptop before.

in conclusion, my FZ190 with Nvidia, while it does run a bit hotter than my other laptops, is definitly one of the quieter laptops I've owned.

 

FZ190 with the waves.

A few seconds after power on, the fan comes on, never stops, and continues to oscillate between settings steadily every second, making an annoying whine as it speeds up, then slows down again. Very annoying. Couldn't focus on anything that I was doing.

I sent it back and ordered another one; I hope they don't all do that.

In my experience, there are two versions of this high-pitched noise (I've looked at a lot of FZs by now). One is very quiet, pretty much stays inside the laptop, and you have to focus to hear it. It's not annoying at all, in fact you can't even hear it most of the time. You have to bring your ear close to the notebook to hear it.

The other is a lot louder by comparison, gives you a headache, and becomes louder while browsing in internet explorere (WTF?).

 

I just purchased an FZ140 from Frys and it had an issue with the left mouse button being loose (had to push it down quite a bit to activate). It had a slight noise to it that I could hear when putting my ear up to the left side of the keyboard, but nothing too major. I exchanged that for a new one, and to my surprise the mouse button is better than the first, but still loose. I guess it's a defect. Anyway, this one has a slightly louder noise to it, still not enough to take it back but I can tell it's there.

Is there any real way to fix this, short of replacing hardware? Can something like this be fixed with a BIOS update?

 

How's the replacement?

(The fan speed variation you've described is exactly what an ATI X1900XTX I had for a couple of days in my desktop would exhibit under load; it seemed to have two speeds, which I called "silent" and "leafblower", and it would switch back and forth between the two every 30 seconds or so. Surely the engineers know that once the fan ramps up, it should stay at the higher speed for several minutes and shouldn't even consider backing off unless the temperature has already fallen a certain amount, determined experimentally to minimize this annoying oscillation effect. The 8800GTS I replaced the ATI with got this right, as does the Antec PSU and Intel motherboard WRT the CPU fan.)