Sony Vaio-Z12 Never Ending High Pitched Whinning/Whirling Noise

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a Sony Vaio-Z12 in Switzerland and for a while it was going perfectly, barely any fan noise whatsoever and mostly 100% silent. However, about a week ago, the vaio started to emit a really high pitched/low frequency whinning/whirling noise. At first i thought it was an SSD issue but upon putting my ear next to the heat sink, it's definitly coming from the fan.

This noise never stops and is extremely annoying since the frequency is really low that it enters your skull/spine and really shakes you. It's almost impossible to work in a quite environment with this unstoppable drone in your skull/spine.

Does anyone else experience similar problems or have any solutions to solve this issue? Any help would be really grateful!!

Thanx

 

I think that's normal fan noise. When heat builds up, the fan spins faster. I think the more important issue is whether there's some runaway process that's making the fan run permanently louder.

Or it could also be that the thermal strategy switched from Silent to Performance, which causes the fan to spin more.

 

Also note that the SSD does not have any moving parts, so it cannot be noisy. Only rotating parts in our Z's are the fan and the DVD-drive.
Also try switching between stamina and speed and see if that makes any difference. You may check the running processes through task manager in order to verify that you don't run anything too power intensive. Let us know of your discoveries...

 

Try blowing the dust out.

 

Hey guys, thanks for the solutions. The thing is i've tried all of that before and i think that it boils down to a hardware issue with the fan. Becasuse i changed to different levels of power consumption when it was in windows 7 and that didnt change anything, then i reinstalled windows xp and the fan didnt stopped whatsoever, even during idle on windows xp. Mind you, all of my installs are clean installs with no background running programs.

Its not the usual increase woosh of fan noise you usually see with running heavy task programs... Its more like a constant buzzing neat the vents that never stops and really makes your head hurt after a while...

 

Mine did this too after reinstalling win7, but after installing all the drivers and then changing the performance profile it quieted down, eventually I will restore to factory condition and see if it was any quieter than it is right now.

 

Yea, with me the machine did quiten down a bit after a clean install but the buzzing/whirling is still there in the background. How do you manage to restore it to factory setting? I restored it once through vaio care to win7 but afterwards i used the windows xp disc that came with it to perform an xp downgrade, now i'm again in a clean install of windows 7 but i can no longer select the factory restore option, it keeps asking for a recovery media despite the recovery partition still being there.... The purple assist button brings me into xp recovery mode, but not windows 7 recovery mode

 

make sure to install all these:
------------------------------------
intel chipset driver
intel management engine interface driver
sony firmware extension parser device driver
sony notebook utilities
sony shared library
vaio event service update
vaio power management update

After that, go into your vaio control center and set the "thermal control strategy" to balanced or silent. That might fix the problem.

 

thanx for the tips, but yea i've installed all of that on the clean install win7 and the problem still persists. i really dnt think this is a software issue since despite whether i've installed drivers or not, the noise is constant, a bit like one of those cheap electric radiators or stoves when turned on, this constant low buzzing noise like electricity but actually the fans.

do you think i should just ask sony to repair it? i really think its a hardware issue but i dnt know if the technicians will actually be able to diagnose it since you can only hear this in a quite environment and i dnt know if the technicians can hear it....

:/

 

I've got VGN-Z that makes high-pitched sounds as well (though not permanent; once every five minutes as it controls its fan speeds, though annoying nonetheless).

As for whether Sony Service decides if there is indeed a problem; that's up to the Service center and the mood of the person checking I'd say. As a result, I made a recording of my sounds with an IC Recorder, and I'm gonna let them listen to it at full volume. I might add how I can replicate the issue (as mine is purely temperature based).

I'd give them a try. Though do so when you're not as dependent on the Z. They can sometimes take their sweet time with things...

 

Try turning up the Display brightness all the way up and listen for a difference. A lot of times, the inverter for the LED backlights make a lot of noise when they're operating their Pulse Width Modulation (flickering at a very high frequency to appear dimmer) circuit.

-Ed