Det är ett annat slags knattrande, ett hackande brus. Det slutar låta när jag drar ur sladden eftersom processorn går ner till reducerad hastighet då.
A Bit More on 15" and 17" PowerBook "Whining" Noises
Reader John notes:
For example, when I was viewing your website in Safari, the whine was there when the machine was "idle", but when I scroll up or down on the page (using either an arrow-key press or moving the scroll bar with the trackpad or even a mouse) the whining stops as long as the scrolling is happening. As soon as the scrolling stops, the whining resumes. This happens regardless of my hand position on the keyboard, trackpad button, mouse, etc. It's definitely related to movement on the screen. Other things that stop the whine are screen activities like the dock hiding/unhiding itself, plugging/unplugging the AC power jack, and disk activity.
I found that setting the Energy Saver processor usage to "Reduced" didn't eliminate the noise, but rather just made it softer. But going between "Highest" and "Reduced" definitely had a reproducible and obvious effect on the noise.
I'm pretty sensitive to similar noises, like TVs that have whining flyback transformers that others don't seem to notice, so I figured it was just me until I read your report. Perhaps the 17" sound is louder or more pronounced too, making it obvious to people that otherwise wouldn't detect the 15" whine.
For the record, my previous 15" TiBook (the 667MHz) didn't have this problem. My suspicion was that the more powerful ATI 3D card built into my current 15" TiBook was the source of the whining, but the 17" PowerBook has the totally different NVIDIA GeForce Go, so perhaps that's not it (or maybe that's what makes the problem more pronounced on the 17"?).
I'll be glad to hear any possible ways to mitigate or eliminate this noise without reducing processor speed, because it does get annoying sometimes when I'm in a quiet environment.
We're still at a loss as far as a permanent solution, if there's even one possible. For now, turning down the processor performance is the only answer we have.
Jag vet inte vad det är som låter, men när jag drar ner processorn blir det tyst. Det är inte hårddisken; den har ett annat ljud.