High pitched speaker noise under Windows

[NBG]

Hi everyone, ever since I installed Windows Vista on my T60, I've noticed a high pitched sound that happens when the speakers are covered and the hardware volume is high enough.

From what I've read on this forum, the solution would be to disable the microphone altogether from sound settings. Except that even doing so, the issue still persists. I've read about some other possible causes, but from testing, I ruled those out. Some solutions did mention covering up the microphone with something like tape, but I'd like to know if there are other ways to fix this rather than a literal band-aid solution.

What's strange is that this has happened only while booted into Windows, it did not happen in the BIOS, or under Linux.

[micrex22]

Hi everyone, ever since I installed Windows Vista on my T60, I've noticed a high pitched sound that happens when the speakers are covered and the hardware volume is high enough.

From what I've read on this forum, the solution would be to disable the microphone altogether from sound settings. Except that even doing so, the issue still persists. I've read about some other possible causes, but from testing, I ruled those out. Some solutions did mention covering up the microphone with something like tape, but I'd like to know if there are other ways to fix this rather than a literal band-aid solution.

What's strange is that this has happened only while booted into Windows, it did not happen in the BIOS, or under Linux.

A cursory search appears to imply this is a phenomenon under Vista with buggy microphone drivers. Did you by chance update to the latest driver provided by IBM? IBM also had a native Vista ISO (although when I installed it, it was quite annoying).

I have Vista on my ajkula66 T601 LED special . It runs some legacy Roland and audio software for some hardware synths. Cool machine, even in 2026.

[RealBlackStuff]

Check the T60 audio and Intel chipset drivers for Vista in the above Drivers link.

[NBG]

So I went ahead and uninstalled my current audio driver and try the one on on this site and it fixed it! I ruled driver issue since I previously used the driver from Lenovo's EOL page which I updated with another driver I found on the internet somewhere, but those did not work.

[RealBlackStuff]

Good to hear!