T42 videocard makes ticking/buzzing noise in games

[JHelgie]

I've had T42 (with mobility 9600) for about 2 years, and after a while, I noticed it would do something odd, if I was running Trillian, and moved my mouse through the contact list, the graphics card would make a "tick" sound each time I moved it. Seeing as I didn't need to do that very often, it wasn't a big deal. But recently, the problem seems to have spread. It started a couple months ago, I noticed that while playing WoW, it would make the sound (it would be a buzzing, which is really just the ticking at a faster speed). It would only do it in rare circumstances (there were spots where I could change where I was looking, and the sound would go away). However, now if I run any 3d game, it makes a varying level of this sound. If I run dxdiag and run the directx tests, all of them cause it to produce a significant amount of sound, which cannot reasonably be ignored (the directx 8 test is particularly bad, I can hear it from 10+ feet away). Running powerplay on the "optimal battery life" setting fixes all of these problems, but of course wreaks havoc on my framerate.

So my question is; Is there anything I can do to fix this (short of running the graphics card at reduced speed), or will I be forced to send it in for repair?

[laz]

As I understand it, this is a common issue with thinkpads. My T42 with a radeon 7500 does the same thing. I haven't come across any solutions though...