Thinkpads Forum

My 2+ year-old T510 beeps randomly at me (this is not the same as the random clicking sounds I mentioned in a different thread here). I am the original owner and very very careful with what it is exposed to. I have noticed that some times - regardless of whether I am running Linux or Windows - my system will give a random number of beeps for no obvious reason whatsoever. The beep is something of a moderately quiet chirping sound, somewhat similar to the beep that you could get from an older Apple Mac if you pressed the shift key many times without pressing anything else. One might call it a chirp.

I also notice this sound even if the system is muted. The number of beeps may be anything from one single random beep to 4 or more in quick secession. The time between beeps is also completely random as best I can tell.

I never see any kind of system notices when the beeps happen. I am completely at a loss for where to even start on this.

And yes, my system warranty passed some time ago. Lenovo never even asked me if I wanted to extend the original warranty when it was running out (something they did ask me for my previous thinkpad when its original warrant was coming to pass).

My old Dell did this, but when I changed hard drive it never beeped at me. So I'm guessing it's the hard disk causing the beeping. Have you checked the S.M.A.R.T data with speedfan or acronis drive monitor?

My old Dell did this, but when I changed hard drive it never beeped at me. So I'm guessing it's the hard disk causing the beeping. Have you checked the S.M.A.R.T data with speedfan or acronis drive monitor?

I just setup the GSmartControl app in Linux and have started running some SMART tests. There were no reported errors prior to running the tests and the ones I have run so far have reported no errors as well.

I did notice that when I ran them it reported the lifetime of the drive at the conclusion of the first test (total time spent on) to be 17,894 hours (yes, nearly 18 thousand hours). This does not surprise me as I do use this system a lot. However I then realized that WD does not seem to publish MTBF for this drive, at least not anywhere where I can find it. It would be interesting to know what kind of life expectancy people have actually experienced with this drive.

Are you getting the random beeping while typing? If that's the case you may want to check out the BIOS | Config | Beep and Alarm | Keyboard beep.

While you're in there, you will notice other events that can cause a beep, try tweaking those.

One other thing that never hurts is to keep the BIOS up to date.

Let me know if that helped.

Cheers.