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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2324 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Ludicrous little laptop malfunction question. It’s my daughter’s, for schoolwork, Minecraft and Discord, not much else.

  • Dell Inspiron 16 5635
  • Windows 11 Home (x64)
  • 2.00 gigahertz AMD Ryzen 5 Processor
  • 850GB storage, 4GB integrated RAM
  • Less than two year old, malware clean, no other issues.

Few months ago started making swarm-of-bees buzzing sound, making it effectively unusable. Brought to repair shop for some expertise. They said fan was dusty, cleaned it, nothing else required. Got it home - buzzing started within few minutes again. Back to repair shop, they’re mystified. THE BUZZING NEVER HAPPENS IN THE SHOP. I recorded a video of the sound, so they believe me, but they can’t find anything wrong. Took the back off in the shop, powered it up, left for 20 minutes - fan running no issues, no abnormal sounds.

Took it home, and a few minutes after booting, swarm-of-bees buzzing starts again.

Software is fine, hardware seems fine, everything seems fine, and technicians have no clue.

Any motherboard nerds have any ideas?

Are you placing it on a different surface/angle when it's at home vs at the shop?

Buzzing a few mins after boot sounds like the fans (or a fan) kicking up as the laptop heats up, and then starts smacking into something in the case.

If your daughter has an angled laptop stand or something that may be causing the case to deform slightly in such a way that nudges something into the fan area and then pings off the fan as it spins.

Does the buzzing sound only happen with Minecraft? I had a laptop back in the day with a CPU fan and a GPU fan. So maybe the shop running the laptop at idle to see if the noise showed up never triggered the GPU fan.

I’m fairly clueless, but I think it only has one fan, and it seems to be spinning fine (including at different angles).

We’ve had it at multiple different angles, stand and flat. In the shop the guy had it on its side for five minutes.

It seems to happen in the house with almost nothing running (we disabled all boot apps) and with RAM and CPU under no pressure.

Shop guy said extremely unlikely but possible is some sort of speaker interference in the house, but I just can’t believe that’s a possibility. Will keep investigating and observing here.

For what it's worth, I threw this into some LLMs

Both ChatGPT and Gemini also think it's environmental. Both seem to think you should be running it at home on battery only, because if that fixes it your problem is the laptop AC adaptor or your electrical circuits.

Are you using your laptop cord at the shop, or theirs?

You could also disable the speakers in device manager, which will eliminate the speaker cause.

Try booting into BIOS and see if it happens there. If it's just happening in windows it might be from power settings.

"4. Fan resonance check.

Does the pitch change when you: lightly press near the left palm rest/vents, lift a corner, or place it on a folded towel? If yes, that's resonance at a specific RPM. Ask the shop to replace the fan module; cleaning won't fix a bearing or blade imbalance."

Try different wall outlets, and if possible, different chargers.

I'm so curious!

Cheers for the curiosity. Will aim to report back on progress. It also happens when not plugged in, so I don’t think it’s the circuits. Environmental issues - will be interested to try to triage those. Radar path, that would be a wow!

Best way to rule out speaker interference would be to take it to a cafe or something and do something on it (taxes? Minecraft? Watch a movie?)

If it happens in a different environment you'll rule out a weird EM field in your house (lol)

Sounds like you've ruled out fan noise. I guess you could try messing with the fan curves (you can in bios, but it's better to do it with an app that allows you to do it real time) when it makes the sound and see if the sound changes (when it's happening) with different fan speeds.

I am not an electrical engineer, but I cannot think of anything that could generate sound in a computer that isn't a fan or its speaker. I don't think solid state electronics can make noise?

I am not an electrical engineer, but I cannot think of anything that could generate sound in a computer that isn't a fan or its speaker. I don't think solid state electronics can make noise?

I think power supply components can generate coil whine. Lots of laptops do this but it tends to be fairly quiet and not a swarm of bees.

Will do the cafe test tomorrow. Worth a shot to see if the issue can be raised outside these four walls.

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