Fan ticking/clicking noise

[hyde]

I just noticed today that I have ticking/clicking problem -for the first time today. Running on battery, after system wakes up from sleeping overnight, it is very obvious when I am scrolling around (holding down the trackpoint and buttons, or keeping any key pressed)

Otherwise during normal operations with reasonable background noise (office, home, tv, street, etc.. either) you cannot hear it. Also I noticed that you cannot hear it when you hold the thinkpad up to your ear, which makes me believe that when you lift or move the laptop the fan tilts and does not make the noise anymore. At first, I thought it was the harddrive and it was engaging the airbag protection, but I noticed even with protection off it still stopped ticking when I lifted the thinkpad.

By the way the ticking is not all the time. Sometimes it stops and comes back, again.. today is the first time I hear it, and got a thread over at Lenovo forums. After about 2 hours break, I felt the ticking again, and I was about to drain the battery so I put the thinkpad to sleep and then plugged it in, and restarted, and now I don't feel the ticking.
It is exactly once every 5 seconds. Someone suggested that I upgrade to Bios 1.21
I didn't even know that 1.21 was released about 2 weeks ago.

Note: 15 minute mark after waking up from sleep state, no ticking so far.

[Mike42]

I can confirm this problem. Since the X220 belongs to my sister I couldn’t do much testing yet. The only time where I was able to hear it was after waking up from suspend to disk while disconnected from AC Power.

[hyde]

Suspend to disk, is that sleep? I put my thinkpad to sleep all the time, I never shut down anymore since the battery life is great.
I wonder if that would hurt anything? I just let it sleep and take it home, and then wake it up. Immediate ON.

Did you try BIOS 1.21? I have not had the luxury of spending an hour or so without my computer so I didn't get a chance yet.

[joedreamer]

I also have this problem.

Because I updated my BIOS to 1.22 as soon as the X220 arrived (I read the forum even before purchasing, so I knew the fan noise issues with older versions of BIOS), I hadn't had issues.

Suddenly, however, when I updated the model number using BIOS update utility last night, the fan noise together with clicking noise (both are related) began.

As said, I have been using BIOS ver. 1.22 from day one, it seems that there's no obvious solution.
Any idea, however?