On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 17:52 -0500, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
Anyway, I have a Dell XPS 13 (9370) circa 2018 and since this
afternoon it has been making screeching sounds, sort of like it is
screeching to a new place, then screeching back, and so on. It has a
SSD (400-AVHW) so what could it be?
Since we can't hear it, we can only guess. The obvious things are
motorised (fans, and drives), the less obvious ones are whines from
switch-mode power supplies (more like loud mosquito noise). Although a
laptop has an external mains power supply, there can be high voltage
generators for LCD backlights.
If the noise changes with screen brightness, I'd suspect the latter.
But if the noise changes with differing CPU loads, I'd suspect a
cooling fan (there may be more than one). Disc drive noises should be
nearly consistent, but will change as the device is being accessed.
It's hard to locate some noises, so using a DIY stethoscope is often
the easiest way to narrow them down. Just a single piece of flexible
pipe in one ear and moving the other end around various parts of the
equipment. I've fixed some very hard to trace squealing noises that
way several times.
Noisy cooling fans may be fixable (if you can get into the bearings),
but often it's simplest and best to replace them. Though I know that's
hard to do on a laptop.
I've a fan somewhere which is all melted, it came from a graphics card.
It eventually seized up and then overheated. Since this was a desktop
PC, we simply fixed an ordinary PC fan in the case that blew all over
the graphics card. It actually did a better cooling job than the
original tiny fan that only cooled one bit of a heatsink.
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