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I have something going on here that seems very mysterious to me. Whenever a large chunk of the screen is redrawn rapidly (such as scrolling down a page in this forum), I hear a clicking or chattering noise.
Characteristics of the noise
1. Completely unrelated to the HDD, as far as I can tell.
2. Very quiet - must be in almost silent room to hear it ordinarily.
3. Sometimes somewhat louder, depending on what I'm doing to cause it.
4. Different when I click and drag on the scrollbar than when I middle-click and scroll with the trackpoint.
5. Difficult to localize when I move my ear around the Thinkpad. Sometimes I can convince myself that it's louder near the speakers, but it honestly doesn't sound like they're the only source.
Characteristics of me
me.1. I don't do drugs.
me.2. Nobody else has given me drugs without my knowledge (as far as I know).
About point 3. The first time I became sensitized to this was when I installed MathGL3d in Mathematica 5.1. I wanted to try to use this to rotate 3D graphs in real time (why can't they just build this darn feature in -- really!). IIRC, I tried to rotate a graph embedded in a worksheet, and had issues. Very laggy, extremely fast flashing of the screen accompanied by a very loud clicking or chattering (grinding?) noise. Computer also slowed, then crashed. I haven't tried to use MathGL3d since (although I'm sure it would be great if I figured out the right way to use it). Anyway, this instance was very loud, but I subsequently noticed that it happens much of the time when redrawing (i.e. scrolling); it's just usually much quieter.
Doesn't seem to be application-dependent, which leaves me with hardware or OS. I wasn't really sure where to post this since I couldn't nail that down.
Hmm... Interesting side-note. It's louder when I scroll this little editing box I'm typing in than when I scroll the outside window...
Anyway, heck if I can figure out anything that happens when the screen is redrawn that should make a sound. I mean, there's nothing moving but electrons, right? I could probably be convinced that somehow some currents in the graphics card are causing interference with the sound system, but it just seems strange. And I could swear the sound isn't just coming from the speakers.
So here are my questions.
Anyone else experience this?
Is this particular only to the T43p? Thinkpads with this 128MB FireGL card (maybe that's only the T43p - don't remember)? Only 15" T43's and not 14.1" T43's (internals probably arranged slightly differently)?
Is this a problem? (Very unlikely IMHO.)
What do you think causes this?
edit - forgot to say I'm running WinXP Pro
