# Weird low pitched "Beep!" comming from my laptop...

## raid517

Hi every now and then maybe once every couple of hours I will hear a not very loud single low pitched beep coming from my laptop. It isn't coming from the speakers - it's coming from somewhere inside the laptop. I wasn't even aware that my laptop had an internal speaker - so I'm not very clear what could be causing this.

It doesn't seem to affect the running of the computer - but nonetheless it's worrying.

Does anyone have any clue what might be causing it?

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## Headrush

Is it a single beep, like a ping, or is it a longer continuous low pitch tone? (I don't mean constant.)

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## raid517

It's a single low pitched beep about 2 seconds long.

BTW it only happens in Linux. It doesn't happen in Windows.

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## dmartinsca

I think my laptop does the same thing. However, i've noticed it in windows as well. At first i thought i was hearing things, now i've just gotten used to it. My only guess as to what it is is the hard drive (one of the heads moving across the entire platter?). To me it doesn't seem like a speaker noise & it happens at completely random times.

Btw, my laptop is an Acer Aspire 5610

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## raid517

It doesn't really sound like the hard disk to me. It sounds distinctly electronic and artificial in origin.

Also I'm pretty sure it has never happened in Windows, as to my discredit perhaps for the first couple of months I owned my laptop, I just used the version of Windows that came preinstalled on it. So I'm pretty sure I would have noticed.

One thing I have noticed is that my laptop runs consistently hotter in Linux than it did in Windows - so much so that it is not always practical to use my laptop on my lap when using Linux.

It would be neat if there was some way I could safely increase the fan speed to cool things down a little.

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## Headrush

 *raid517 wrote:*   

> One thing I have noticed is that my laptop runs consistently hotter in Linux than it did in Windows - so much so that it is not always practical to use my laptop on my lap when using Linux.

 

Does your CPU support speed throttling and is it configured under Linux?

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## Simom

I have the same thing, but only in Windows, not at all in Linux. I have noticed that everytime my laptop beeps like this, the harddrive have gotten pretty warm. I'm not sure can it have some kind of warning-beep like this, it sounds like coming from the same corner where harddrive is. Laptop is Asus A6t and harddrive Hitachi Travelstar 5k100.

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## danomac

We have a photocopier at work that uses a laptop 2.5" drive for caching and whatnot. A couple months ago, I was working after hours and I thought I heard beeping from it. I was there for 5 hours or so... and it got louder and louder, to the point of it sounding like a crying animal - and 2 days later it was dead.

I'd be backing up important stuff on your drives.

 *raid517 wrote:*   

> It's a single low pitched beep about 2 seconds long.

 

This was how it started...

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## zxy

I only got this beeps when battery was very low.

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## Simom

 *danomac wrote:*   

> We have a photocopier at work that uses a laptop 2.5" drive for caching and whatnot. A couple months ago, I was working after hours and I thought I heard beeping from it. I was there for 5 hours or so... and it got louder and louder, to the point of it sounding like a crying animal - and 2 days later it was dead.

 

That's what I feared, but this has been going on for two months, since this laptop was brand-new. SMART reports everything is OK, Only lifetime max-temperature was pretty high, 58 Celsius degrees. Normally it's much lower, somewhere near 40 degrees.

Maybe its better check I don't have anything important that I haven't yet backupped...

And my laptop has always been on ac-power, battery fully charged when this happens. This doesn't even have a battery-low-beep, just warning-light.

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## raid517

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes my low battery light will come on - even though I am on AC power. (again this only happens in Linux).

The beep doesn't always happen when this happens - so I haven't previously made any association - nor do I know if such an association is valid.

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## danomac

The thing with our photocopier is, that drive basically runs 24/7. And it had run 24/7 for almost 6 years then that happened. I was reading your thread and thinking to myself "hmm, that sounds awfully familiar...  :Wink: 

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## DirtyHairy

High-pitched beeping noiced are a common phenomenon with laptops and even desktops, e.g. ThinkPads are known to produce a variety of them  :Wink:  The reason are signals which carry some modulation in the audible frequency range (some 50 - 20000 Hz) which can be heard because the magnetic field associated with the current causes a (very slight) deformation of ferromagnetic materials - the same effect accounts for the buzzing of tranformator coils. For example, I get a high-pitched "buzzing" on my Thinkpad T60 when speedstep kicks in, a even higher pitched beeping when the CPU is under load, and my PowerMac G4 exhibits all kinds of low buzzing noises (which partly are correlated with moving the mouse).

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## raid517

Well that sure sounds like an impressive explanation. The question is, is it dangerous - and why (for me at least) does it only ever seem to happen in Linux?

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## DirtyHairy

Well, IF this is the source of your noise (at least, apart from your hard drive and the speakers, this is the only way for the machine to produce noises I'm aware off), it should be completely harmless. Possibly some piece of hardware is driven differently under linux than under windows which might explain this not occuring under windows.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_high_pitch_noises has some ideas on how to remove similar noises, but I would simply suggest to live with it  :Smile: 

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## Simom

I'm not sure could it be the case with my laptop, as there can be many weeks of silence between these beeps. It is of course possible, maybe Windows does sometimes something special with the harddrive, I don't use it very much so I haven't recognised any special pattern to reproduce the beep, only hdd-temp measured with my hand  :Smile: . Maybe I should install some SMART-monitoring program in Windows too and make clear is it something with hd or is it something else.

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