Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I just recieved an Advanced dock which i have bought as near new/mint condition. So far evething's fine except:

- Extremely high fan noise, more than my desktop.
- A near faint whine/hiss sound coming from under the left side area of the laptop, near the Z key, but it's defininitely coming from the dock. It's always there, regardless of laptop power settings, and bluetooth and wifi, wwan status.

I will open this dock up to solve the crappy amount of fan noise it suffers from - the outside fan is loud and whirring cold air only. So i'll be installing a rheostat somewhere so it will have variable fan speed.

Anyways, does anyone have a solution to the hiss, or what it might be? It's not coming from the air blown out by the fans ...

I've never heard a hiss from my advanced dock, except for the fan on a graphics card that I have installed inside the dock.

I disconnected both fans on the dock (one external, one inside the expansion bay) with no adverse effects.

Ok, good to hear
Well, i found out that when really stressing the ati v5200 with high detail games, the slight hiss stops. I'm not sure if it is caused by the cpu or the gpu. Neither Powerplay or cpu speed settings seem to correct it, so....
There have been some patches and "hacks" for Core Duo and Windows XP use - do you have any of these installed?

I'm thinking of modifying the dock with a trimpot to control the large fan, was it hard to take the dock apart?

EDIT: Running Super-pi and doing a 4M calculation stops the hissing. Must be the cpu.
EDIT2: I was wrong... the hissing is definitely coming from the PSU area, actually pretty sure it's the inductors used inside. Solution is most likely epoxy?

To disconnect the Advanced Dock's fan, I just reached through the rear grill and snipped the wires.

I've heard that the AD is hard to open. I've never tried.