Eliminating the CPU "hiss" (whine?) from the T61?

LMN8R · 09-26-2007, 11:07 PM

I recently got my T61, and I really do love it. Works great, is fast. It has the T7500 and Quadro in it.

However, when on battery power, there's a constant "hiss" type of noise coming from the computer. It's not a high-pitched whine as I expected when hearing about this problem, but rather it sounds like rapid hard drive access, even though the hard drive isn't doing anything at the time.

I've heard of a couple fixes, such as disabling this or that power saving feature, but I'd really like to avoid that. I thought I remembered reading about an updated driver I could download to fix this problem, but I can't find it anywhere.

Can anyone help me out? Thanks.

braddd · 09-26-2007, 11:08 PM

Try the 163.44 nVidia drivers, I had a hiss/whine/weird sound that stopped after installing those drivers. You can get them here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

LMN8R · 09-26-2007, 11:13 PM

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately, I already have those drivers installed from that web site. I was wondering if there was something more along the lines of a CPU driver update?

noxxle99 · 09-26-2007, 11:14 PM

Disable USB power management

LMN8R · 09-26-2007, 11:19 PM

Didn't help. I checked the box for "enable always-on USB" and disabled whatever usb power saving I could find. The noise is still there.

phil823 · 09-26-2007, 11:27 PM

i read somewhere on this forum that it can be solved by turning off a sleep mode..

Mark · 09-26-2007, 11:28 PM

Hmm...as far as I know, it is related to the CPU itself and some deeper sleep states it has.

I think people have talked about some software to fix it. For some reason, the program RMClock Utility sticks in mind.

If I were you, just google something like "CPU whine + Core 2 Duo". I am sure there will be plenty of info as this is common to all Core 2 notebooks I believe.

Hope this helps.

jeffsiler · 09-27-2007, 12:31 PM

Disable CPU power management in the BIOS. I guarantee this will stop the whine.

Jeff

LMN8R · 09-27-2007, 12:49 PM

Ah, in the BIOS you say. I'll give that a shot.

Just wondering though, won't that seriously cut down on battery life? I have the "max CPU speed" on battery power set to "lowest" and I get a good 3-4 hours out of it on a full charge. I'd hate for that to drastically decrease simply so I can get rid of a hiss.

Or is that CPU speed limitation a different form of battery saving than the stuff that would be disabled in the BIOS?

elfroggo · 09-27-2007, 04:15 PM

If you are running the processor at full power you won't be likely to encounter the issue. If you disable the power management in bios then it will always run at full speed so yes it will cut down battery life