Hi. I recently received my X200T. All has been well for about 2-3 weeks. A few days ago I started noticing some high pitched whines coming from the tablet. If I put my ear up to the heat sink/fan at the left I can definitely hear it make an almost morse code like beeping. It's really only noticeable in a quiet room and doesn't seem to be totally related to hard drive activity or even AC/Battery power. I looked at some threads about this, but I'm wondering if this is about Centrino or something else
Ok so I'm thinking that I have the CPU whine issue based on general research. What I'm wondering if anyone has had this issue with their Lenovo tablet and sent it back for servicing and had the issue resolved.
I have a minor issue with whine on my x200 Tablet (1.86GHz C2D). It is only audible in a quiet room when the fan spins very slowly (which it usually does). It's not a serious problem, but it can be annoying at times (I get a little obsessive about these little things). The odd thing I have found is that it seems to be OS dependent. I triple boot Vista, XP, and Ubuntu. On Vista/XP the whine is very minimal (often non-existent). However, under Ubuntu (running as a type this) it is very loud and I can hear it from 2 feet away. It is possible that there is some power management trick which can adjust this. I doubt Lenovo would take your computer in and swap the MOBO/CPU for this problem. Even if they did, I think there is a decent chance you would have the same problem again. My theory is that the people that don't complain about the whine simply have lost the ability to hear that frequency (it is very high and comparable to an old CRT television being turned on). I have read of various fixes to this problem, but none of them seem that effective or safe. Some people report putting it in max performance mode and/or disabling sleep states fixes the problem (doesn't do it for me, plus you sacrifice serious battery life by doing this). Others suggest max battery mode (doesn't work for me either). The one method I have heard suggested that might work is using hot glue on the capacitors on the motherboard as it insulates them from possible whine. However, this will almost certainly void your warranty and the whine doesn't bother me that much. If anybody come up with a fix (or at least a method of reducing whine, and improving battery life in Ubuntu) that does not void the warranty or have a negative affect on battery life, I would love to hear it.
Thanks for the thoughts. I have no problem sending it to the Lenovo depot. However, if it just means trucking the system back/forth with no net gain then its a waste of time. I'm going to tinker with various online suggestions and see what happens. If it gets louder over time (which I swear it is, but I could just be fooling myself) then I'll send it in at least once while I'm under warranty. Right now I have a hard time not hearing it since I'm always checking to see if its doing that. It's definitely occurring when I'm on the "High Performance" power profile. It's not the AC adapter. I get this on the high performance profile on battery too. Once I set it to "Balanced" or less its dead quiet. I haven't tested this thoroughly, but it seems that when the system is under load (e.g. doing some computational stuff) the noise goes away. I was fiddling with some 3d software on AC power yesterday morning for an hour and then stopped to listen for the whine. Nothing. Came back later of course. It explains why I didn't notice it at first since I tend to run off of battery power a lot. I was recharging with the system off a lot for the first week or two. I had actually heard some high pitched sounds but at first didn't connect the sound to the tablet. If Ubuntu doesn't have a way to speed step the CPU it may be stuck on high power all the time which is why you'd hear it all the time. Just a stab. I don't run Ubuntu.
hi, have the x200t for 1 week, was running the pre-os from lenovo and didn't notice anything. but at the moment I'm doing a clean install of vista and I have the same sound you're describing...
Ubuntu does Speed Step (it reports between 42% and 100% depending on activity), however it may not be able to properly do all the processor sleep states and some other tricks. The whine may disappear under load because the fan speeds up. I don't hear much of anything when my computer is working either because the fan is able to drown out the whine noise (smooth broadband white noise for the fan vs. a whine for the CPU). Knowledge of this problem doesn't make it better. I also hold mine up to my ear from time to time just to listen for the whine (would be better if I could just tone it out).
ahhh i got it here too 1.6ghz vista 32... started after a few weeks... either that or i just didnt notice it edit: theres no whine when im in power saver
It will only void the warranty if you are caught doing it. Hot glue does not have an aggressive tack to non-fiber surfaces so I think if you needed to get it off of your mobo you could. That being said, I don't think it is a good idea to insulate using hot glue considering you may be putting the glue on a surface that gets hot and may melt the glue all over again. Bigger mess than its worth. You could try rubber cement. Don't go with an epoxy, thats way too strong of a bond. ;D
