Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:19 PM
So tonight I picked up a new laptop: an HP Pavillion dv9000! Great machine...I love pretty much everything about it. Except the whine.
Oh the whine! How annoying! It just sits there and this high pitched whining emits from right under the keyboard. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn't...it just got way too annoying, as if some leprachaun was slowly sawing away on my auditory nerves using dental floss coated in shards of glass. But I digress...
I turned to the internet and found, to both my joy and dismay, that I'm not alone in this. Apparantly, this is an issue not with HP per-se, or Dell, or any of the other pc maker...no the culprit in this is the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and its ability to handle switching between power modes.
Core 2 Duos have the ability to go from high power mode (plugged in) to low power mode (battery). In addition, when you use your laptop in non-processor intensive situations, your CPU is smart enough to realize that it needs to throttle down since you don't really need it flexing all its muscles in tanned, sunblock-soacked perfection.*
For whatever reason, this is what causes the high pitch squeel. But fear not! HP has a solution that it posted here on its support page. Obviously the solution is simple: disable the feature.
I kid you not...and you know what? It worked!
That's right, following HP's directions, going into the BIOS, and disabling the C4 or whatever it was called, actually stopped the high pitch whirling noise from emitting. That's great you would think...but why does it sound like my fans are going 100% of the time...and my laptop seems to be a bit hotter than it was before...
I guess my real concern is about whether turning off that feature will cause long-term damage down the road because teh CPU is running at a stronger rate all the time than it needs to.
The other concern is that this doesn't seem to be an HP thing like I mentioend, but a Core 2 Duo thing. Shouldn't this be addressed in some form of design alteration for future laptops, and potentially a recall for the existing machines out there?
So for now, I'm going to enjoy my laptop (which kicks ass btw), and evaluate it by the end of the week and see if its going back or not...I'm thinking not, but we'll see.
D
*Note: That's what I gathered from reading the forum posts anyway...don't take that as gospel, research it for yourself...but I think I'm pretty bang on.