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Old July 11th, 2005, 10:54 PM
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jtdoom jtdoom is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
O/S: Windows 8 Pro
Location: Belgium, East Flanders
Posts: 5,990
Weird Sounds

hi
your machine emits sounds you never heard it make before, or it just makes sounds you think are abnormal.
You would like to locate the source, right?

Case vibration... Sometimes devices are not fixed to the bays very well. CDROM drives can sometimes really make a racket when they speed up with a CD in the drive. An unbalanced print on the CD (or a sticker) can worsen that vibration a great deal.
Extra screws will usually help, and sometimes fixing another device in another part of the bay reduces case vibration a lot more.
I have on occasion wedged foamrubber where I had no means of using screws (in systems with rails )
I have even had to replace the device with a less loud one...


okay, vibration can be felt, and a bay is quite safe to touch.
Just watch out ....
Do not touch spinning fans, they can CUT you.

Do look at fans, a wire or ribbon can touch it, what makes a bad sound, and is bad to wire and fan.

Fans with a ton of dust in it, well, you can clean them out, but quite often you should replace them soon afterward.

Fans can be LOUD when NEW. Silent fans with same air displacement per minute CFm (Cubic Feet /m) will cost that little extra, what is part of the reason a silent case costs more than the el cheapo case you get for 35 Euro.
In general, he faster fans turn (rpm), the more noise. A fan with bigger diameter, like 12 cm, has to run slower for same air displacement, and should be more quiet. It still can make too much noise, though... and it can cause vibration too.
(unevenly distributed cat hair, for instance...)
all in all, 12 centimeter fans make less rackett.

Anyway, some sounds are hard to pinpoint.

With two hard drives, almost sandwiched (they may not even have case sheeting betwix them)
they are so close tohether putting oyur ear close just tells you it is generally located there...

And, you want to know which one is whining, which is kinda screeching?
Well, you could take a long straw or reed, put one end to the drive (or any other part as long it cannot get caught in something you see spinning) and then put the other end to that little piece of skin you can shut your ear with.
That reed, it is like a stethoscope... without soft ends... don't put it IN your ear... but you will hear the difference between two drives no sweat.

(Oh, Avoid sandwiching drives... Hard drives on top of one another will start thermal recalibration because they have to.
When they run cool, you seldom hear recalibration.

listen to fan housings with a reed, you will hear wether the bearing is gone or not.
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