Weird electrical noise from laptop

devnull

I have a Spectre X360 which is now just over two and a half years old it came with a two year warranty that has obviously now expired.

I noticed a low level squeal electrical sound coming from near the fan area The sound is like a low volume version of a hard drive working heavily on a old computer but a little quieter, but I have a SSD in this laptop. It's only possible to hear it if you have your ear close to underneath where the CPU is.

It does NOT seem to be influenced by computer load / charging or plugged in devices and if the fan is on at all you cannot hear it, it's only when the fan is not working is it possible to hear it. It is also not caused by Wifi or bluetooth as I turned them off and it still occurs.

If I pull the HDMI cable out to the external monitor it stops for 2 seconds, if I put it back in, it also stops for 2 seconds, which indicates me it might be graphics related but I cannot be sure of this.

Is this the sign of a capacitor going? If so what can I do to extend the life of it and prevent it blowing, since I guess out of warranty repair when it does go is going to be mega expensive?

Alanstrainor

Yeah my guess would be a capacitor bursting, or something along that kind of line. I really don't know what you can do, as replacing a capcitor would be next to impossible I would imagine. It could be a case of a new motherboard if it resulted in a complete failure of the system.

I see people talking about a similar issue here:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Boot-and-Lockup/HP-Spectre-x360-will-not-charge-nor-boot/td-p/5657522

devnull

Yeah, I really want to wish that a failure is not imminent but honestly I'm starting to think that it might be, I don't know how long it has been going on for and discovered it by chance, it's not possible to hear it unless your ear is close to it or you know it's there.

Motherboard is going to be hundreds no doubt so it'll probably be beyond economical repair and I may as well buy something new, but that would really suck as I was hoping to get another 6 months out of it and sell it when I buy something new.

This machine has been worked fairly hard though, spends a lot of time with all three USB ports in use and using HDMI to power a second display as well as being used on my travels a lot as well, so I guess that's contributed to it.

devnull

This is exactly like mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIrkcDZn1G8

Alanstrainor

That doesn't sound like capacitor squeal to me... but I also have no clue what it could be either! That's mad, really not something that should happen to a computer of that age

devnull

Unfortunately over the last 7 days there has been a large decrease in system stability.

I am experiencing all of the following
- Machine freezing when entering sleep mode to the point where it doesn't sleep and requires a hard power off.
- Machine not waking up from sleep when in sleep and requiring a hard power off.
- Machine waking from sleep but Wifi defective requiring a hard power off to restore.

I've also seen 4 blue screens, I hadn't seen any since 2015 until now.

I've got full hardware logging on temp, CPU usage, graphics temp, memory usage and unable to diagnose the problem and it is certainly not driver or update related as I've rolled back to before when the problems started and they still occur.

Unfortunately I fear that motherboard failure may will be imminent unless anyone can think of anything else?

ED E

Its some form of coil whine. Caps make bangs, coils(transformers) make screeches.



You have a handful of these on your board. Could well be one of them. Unfortunately replacement of said outside of warranty could be expensive.


Generally HP have had very mixed QC in their premium units of the last few years, wouldn't be surprised to see them do a Sony and exit.