T41 noise - rhythmic brief pitch change every 3-4 seconds

[alexd]

Okay, so I posted in the T60 forum a few weeks ago about my last computer's problem.

I am freaking out - I have several hundreds of pages of a thesis I am working on due in a few weeks and my T60 Mainboard seemed to be going. I love ThinkPad's - I don't game, I just type and research and want reliability.

I didn't have time to deal with it so I buy a refurb T41 from IBM for $500 - all the bells and whistles, great deal for what I need to do.

Now, after a few days of great, stress-free writing on my perfect new computer, I start hearing a noise...
Lower left part of the computer/keyboard area (HDD I think?); every 3.5-4 seconds a sudden pitch change. It is rhythmic and never changes although it's not _always_ there...particularly when I first start up/come out of standby.

Sounds like its humming along: (rmmmmmmmmmRMMmmmmmmmmmmmRMmmmmmmmmmm) with 3.5ish seconds between RMM's (brief but instant shift to a higher pitch that drops back quickly to normal, quiet, lower pitch).

The sound generally goes away as I rest my left palm over the lower left area where the noise is coming from - if I apply enough pressure to flex things a little bit.

I would generally start messing around, swapping components but I simply do not have time right now.

Main question: Does this sound like a soon-to-be-dead drive or some other component? I am backing up religiously, but I just lost a $2000 T60 (2 years old) and now I spent another $500 on credit and I am just a student.

Any ideas? I'm hoping it's a fan; the case-flex fix seems to be a good sign but I'm not sure.

Anything to test? To worry about?

thanks,

Alexis

[zdriver]

Sounds like the processor cooling fan.
The hard drive is under the right palm rest area. If you take off the keyboard and leave it plugged in to start the thinkpad, then lift it up slightly, you can verify it by listening to the fan.

[alexd]

It's definitely coming from the left-hand side and I think it is a fan.

I've been sitting here word processing for a few hours and it has been running constantly both on battery and off. It is very loud compared to my T60!

The fan has been (most of the time) making the mechanical noise described in my first post and it also often makes a faint, higher-pitched and faster, alternating electronic-beeping noise.

I have the processor speed set to "adaptive" in both AC and Battery modes. Think this is a problem?

[alexd]

UPDATE: The newest ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 driver from the Lenovo site stopped the fan for a moment, although its back on now. Will see what happens.

[Johan]

Alex:

I am sorry to hear of all your troubles - while in the midst of preparing your thesis, when there it is particularly stressful to fear for the stability of your PC.. Just a few suggestions if you do have a few moments to "play" with your T41:

1) See Hard drive is clicking all the time! pointing to Hard drive firmware update (Bootable diskettes) - ThinkPad General. Will your HDD benefit from this upgrade? Hey, remember to backup essential documents before doing anything such "radical" updates!

2) If you fear that your HDD is perhaps about to fail, you may test it using one of the tools supplied by the vendors:

Fujitsu --> Hard Drives - Software Utilities

Hitachi --> Hitachi Downloads and Utilities

Seagate --> Seagate SeaTools

Since your "new" T41 is still under warranty, a new HDD is covered by this, and is only a phone call away. You may use the free trial version of Acronic True Image Home ver. 11 to clone your existing HDD to a replacement, if this become necessary. In such case, you will need e.g. an external USB storage or the ThinkPad 2nd HDD Adapter for Ultrabay Slim Bay or an USB-to-IDE-HDD cable (see the thread How I Cloned My IBM ThinkPad T42 Hard Drive - Step by Step discussing these).

3) If you have a Hitachi HDD (which you may, or may not?) in your T41, then there is a tool made by Hitachi that will allow you to reduce the HDD noise a bit - by enabling "Advanced Acoustic Management" [AAM] - get the Hitachi Feature Tool. Although it is not primarily intended to control heat dissipation, it has been reported to have a positive impact on that; see Some observations after using Hitachi Feature Tool. If you don't have a Hitachi HDD, chances are that the particular HDD vendor has a similar tool; I don't recall this right now on the fly.

4) To reduce the fan "on-time" you can reduce the CPU and GPU power consumption (and hence reducing the power dissipated by these); see e.g. the thread T43 operating temperature (see the post of Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:06 pm), and get the (free and HIGHLY recommended!) program "Notebook Hardware Control" - this can be used to reduce the power consumption in your T43, which will have a significant (positive!) impact on the "fan on" time and also fan speed. Go get it!!

And no, setting the processor speed to "adaptive" in both AC and Battery modes should certainly not cause any problems, actually on the contrary it should throttle down the CPU speed whenever possible - and hence reduce power consumption and by this heat and by this leave the fan off.

Good luck with your T41 and especially successfully completing your theses!

Best regards,

Johan

[alexd]

Hi Johan,
Thank you for all your suggestions.

1. Somehow I don't think there are any hard drive problems as I first speculated although I may diagnose it when I have some time. Meanwhile, I constantly back up to USB drive and can always switch over to my handicapped T60 if the worst happens to the T41.

2. The updated Radeon driver only makes the fan shut down for a moment as I am starting up and loading windows. Otherwise, the CPU fan continues all the time.

When I have time, I will follow your suggestion and check what kind of temperatures I am dealing with on the processor to find out if this is a fan issue or a heat issue. This is important to figure out if it is a hardware or a software thing.

3. I recently got an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSOD on startup that would only go away by booting into safe mode w/o networking. Then, a few hours later it started up fine and I haven't had the problem since. I decided to run MemTest86+ to check the RAM and all checked out fine over many tests.


With all these strange, intermittent problems, I think I will continue doing some simple diagnostics until I get this thesis off to be bound next week.

At that point if I haven't somehow magically solved all the problems, this machine is going back to IBM and I will make use of the warranty that I paid for (similar machines were $150 cheaper "as is" on Ebay).

thank you for your help