Bad noise on quite new laptop.

Hi,

I hope somebody can give me an opinion from his experience. This laptop is 4 months old, Asus X501A. I had to return another one to Amazon because it made some bad clicking noises and the hard disk was faulty as Hard Disk Sentinel said it was with 68% health new. So, this laptop model might have a bad hard disk (Seagate).

Anyway, I recorded the noise with my phone and here is the link. The three files are about the same. 30 seconds with this little buzz, then some click, and then silence, only to start again a little later. The clicks have always been there, I heard it was no problem, the heads parking or something not bad. But this buzz... It is low, not as loud as the recordings may show, but still it surely is a sign of a serious problem.

By the way, I installed W8.1 from scratch, a clean install, and it did't go away. It was on W8 and it is on W8.1.

Here goes the link: Redirecting... (small 30 secs 3gp files)

Thanks for your opinions in advance.

Cheers.

Get your money back.

Really? Is it so bad?

The buzzing sounds to me like a bad fan or possibly a really bad hard drive. The clicking is a classic symptom of a bad hard drive. In my experience a new laptop should at most make a faint airflow sound when the fan is running (if it has a fan).

I have an acer aspire M that is a few months old and I can't hear the drive at all; I had it for a few weeks before I noticed that I can hear the airflow from an internal fan sometimes. I assume the fan only runs when it is needed, which seems to be rarely.

That's buzzing shouldn't be heard on new laptops, be it 4 months old.

If it's not the fan, it's the haddrive.

Make a backup of all your important data asap.
If you can't replace it or get your money back, the best solution is to replace the harddrive or put an SSD inside (eventually check the fan as well, see if it's clogged).

It's gone for a couple of days now. It's gone without doing anything.

Mysteries of computers.

Thanks a lot to all.

kmint said:

It's gone for a couple of days now. It's gone without doing anything.

Mysteries of computers.

Thanks a lot to all.

Click to expand...

Were you by chance been booting/running a Linux live CD/USB before the buzzing?
I had something similar some time ago but manifested itself only after the first couple of reboots after running on a live CD/USB Linux distro. The CD/USB linux disk had a mbr/legacy version on it and Win8 is UEFI, so temporarily the legacy support in BIOS had to be on. Since my hardware (IDT audio: no good drivers and your're buzzed away) combined with the secure boot and UEFI suffers at sound level from periodic MBR boots I've decided not to go in MBR/legacy mode on the affected machine ever since and all is fine now.

Certified Win8 UEFI hardware is not so compatible with older MBR OS versions, IDT audio is not working properly in Linux with some default drivers/settings, even on Windows is going bad without the right drivers... To avoid the issue and still run the needed OS/software, use Linux, or in case the OS is MBR, in a VM on the Win8 on the affected machine.

Nope. I haven't run any Linux for some long time. I do occasionally, but the last time was long ago. The noise started much after that.

Running Hard Disk Sentinel showed 100% disk health.

Maybe some dirt in the fan that went away by itself?

This started when I was on W8 and after moving to W81 it remained but has gone after a couple of days.

So weird. If it comes back I will be... worried, to say something light.