Gateway M675X Pent 4 w/ 3.2 G Hz - Noise issues

Brightbelt · Post by **Brightbelt** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:52 pm

Hi -
I just joined this forum, and while I'm glad I found it, I'm not sure my problem can be helped. I'm a professional musician/music publisher and have just put pro audio recording software on my Gateway Laptop.

I'm going into it directly with firewire and the recordings are great in quality but this laptop makes a whooshing/whining noise and cycles on every 30 seconds or so. It's like 15 seconds on/30 seconds off.

I know that it is the processing fan (I actually put a new hard drive on it in case that was the problem but nothing changed).

Also, a Gateway Tech support rep guided me into the BIOS and we disabled the Hyperthreading in case that might be affecting it, but that made no difference. (I reactivated it)

Today even, a fellow who used to work in this field of helping people customize more quiet computers looked at it and said there's nothing I can do.

Some older Gateways had silencer options in the BIOS but this one does not. Also, I've tried different settings in the Power Management settings in my Win XP Pro control panel, and nothing helps.

So, ...does anyone have any ideas (just in case) ?

Thanks,...Frank

tjpark1111 · Post by **tjpark1111** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 11:07 pm

I had a noisy toshiba laptop but after I cleaned out all the dust in the HUGE heatsink, the fan became pretty quiet and significantly lower temps. I don't mean just buying one of those cans and try to blow it out through the vents, take everything apart and actually take the heatsink out if you can. While you're at it, some arctic silver 5 thermal compound on the cpu would help. The on and off of fans every 30 seconds is very common with untuned, cheap, fan controllers on the mobo, so I can't help with that, but it shouldn't happen if the temps are lower. Did it do this annoying thing from day 1 of using the computer?

JimX · Post by **JimX** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 2:12 am

If what I read is right, you have a Mobile Pentium 4 538 Prescott processor. It has Speedstep capability. Isn't there an option for Speedstep in BIOS?

The way the laptop P4-P4M fan controllers work is unfortunately flawed. They stop, then go to low, then stop. Have you heard the fans on high?

tjpark1111 is right, I clean the heatsinks in my Toshiba P20 (3,2 Northwood) very often, and fans turn on less often when clean. The AS5 part is not very easy... I did it of course!

Fans spin for 20 seconds every 3 minutes now, but this is a cooler CPU than yours.

Brightbelt · Post by **Brightbelt** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 3:01 am

Hey guys -
I appreciate your attention and suggestions! Yes indeed, this annoying fan, whooshing thing has happened since day 1 when I bought it! The intermittant wooshing sound is in fact the processing fan speeding up, so I assume it is kicking into "high".

2 Tech guys at Gateway have already told me there's nothing in the BIOS for this machine that will help, but I will check with Gateway again about the "Speedstep Capability" in the BIOS and see if that kicks them into gear ;.)

If that fails, I'll go ahead and take my laptop to a computer shop I know and have them do the AS5 and the Heatsink if possible.

I could probably do that myself, but this laptop is still under warranty, so why take chances ?

Thanks again for your help and suggestions,....Frank

Gateway M675X Pent 4 w/ 3.2 G Hz - Noise issues

Gateway M675X Pent 4 w/ 3.2 G Hz - Noise issues

sounds like progress...