Thinkpads Forum

A while ago I bought this Lenovo’s notebook and pretty soon I noticed these strange noises coming out. Firstly I thought that these electric-like noises come from a hard drive or a fan but later after I reinstalled my windows xp stuffing it with lenovo’s drivers and software for a couple of times I discovered that it was somehow related to a fingerprint reader. It was obvious because after disabling it from device manager noises disappear. Later on, I found that disabling a USB Root Hub (non 2.0 interface) that fingerprint reader is attached to noises disappear too. However disabling any other non 2.0 USB Root Hub (there are 4 of them each with two ports) also makes the same even though fingerprint reader is not attached to it. The problem is that after that battery consumption jumps up to 3.5 watts eating about 4 whole hours!!! The same happens if the “Allow the computer to turn of this device to save power” option of fingerprint reader or any of non 2.0 USB Root Hubs are unchecked. To make it more nightmarish the noises intensify after the track point is moved…

Does anybody have even a perception about how is the fingerprint reader, USB devices, battery life and a track point are relayed causing these annoying noises? The option of choosing either noise or such battery life loss is not something to be tolerated after paying stacks of money for the little guy…

I would be very glad to hear any suggestions to fix the problem...