Hey em-ers,
I've been having one small issue with my MacBook & thought I'd check in with the guys & gals at em411 for some insight.
The things been making some awful noise lately; a constant, persistent rattling. I called Mac's support line & they scared the b'jesus out of me by saying that the vast majority of persistent rattles are coming from the hard drive and are indicative of immanent disk failure.
To assuage my fears, even though I use Time machine religiously, I installed the Fan Control app (because I've had a hunch it's the fan all along). Well, the very moment I finished installing the app the speed of the noise ramped up considerably, and by varying the base speed of the fan within the Fan Control panel I can vary the speed of my rattle.
To finally prove to myself it was the fan & not the drive, I took it to the closest Mac authorized techs in my neighbourhood @ Best Buy. Well, the GeekSquad there ran several hours of diagnostic tests on the machine & found no problems whatsoever. They also proclaimed the fan noise non-existent, but in my defense their area of the store is ridiculously close to the stereo department and there was no chance in hell they'd hear the noise over the din of the local radio schlock.
I've done some net research as well, but none of the common problems seem to be my problem.
I had no pending print job waiting, and to be on the safe side I uninstalled all printers to no avail.
When I run Activity Monitor, nothing is ramping up my CPU, even when I switch the filter to All Processes. I shut down everything that wasn't necessary & got 99% CPU idle & still my noise is there.
Any ideas? I've been recording a lot of acoustic things lately, and I'd hate for this to become an issue in the studio. Also, it's driving my wife batty, and sometimes it's loud enough to mask my tinnitus, which is apparently a bad idea as well.
 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Written June 14 2009 , Tags: mac, fan, noise
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Use SuperDuper back up as you can actually boot from the back up unlike Time Machine. That way you'll have no downtime due to rebuilding if you have to replace the HDD
sample it and makes tunes:
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i had a noisy fan in my previous macbook pro.. they replaced them (out of warrenty) for 350bux
it was the sound of failing ball bearings. 350 for a fan seems a bit extreme...
Try tilting the macbook at different angles, see if the noise changes. +1 on the worn bearings, go to the repair store and say "Hi, my macbook fan is broken" and get them to change it. Letting them think about it is probably too complex. It's not a cd spinning in the drive is it? @ zanf - with that super duper prog, can you back up your hdd, replace your hdd, then install the back up to it and run as it was before without having to re-license software or re-install anything?
Recent blogs: blog
you'd always have to re-license software, when it uses a challenge/response copyright protection scheme. other than that. it works like you thought
macs are so nice until something TINY goes wrong
350 for a fan? you could buy a new 3ghz 3gigRAM 300gig hdd PC for 400 at wal mart. yup, retarded.
then i spilt more coffee on it a few months later. @drewzle - nice link
@dach - no media in drive - now that would be retarded And yes, the noise does vary when I wiggle the machine. Stoopid ball bearings. I'm still under warranty, so I can boot it into Toronto & go to an Apple store & make one of their genii to fix it for me, but I do a fair amount of freelancing with this box & I don't want to be without for too long, so I must a) phone ahead & see how long it'll take & b) figure out when the heck I can get there. My 4-yr-old son probably would have a cow getting dragged along for such a trip, so maybe I'll put it off until September when he starts school. It should still be under warranty then. Sound like a plan? my repair took a few hours.
i dropped it off, ate lunch, started to head home, they called me said it was done. Given the commute I'd have to pull off to make that happen we're talking a whole (school) day commitment.
I'll have to give it some deep thought. Maybe do it over the summer break (only a couple of weeks away) when my other kid can run cover, drop it off, go see a movie. or you can just buy a new laptop
or you could buy one for me. one of the new giant screen MB Pros would be nice. I'll send you the specs, but to play it safe you can just assume I want everything maxed out.
Yeah I had a noisy macbook fan the other day.
He wouldn't shut up about some damn snow lepord OS or somthin, so I punched him. (wink) am I the first to make a pun? I grabbed a new fan off of iFixit when mine went tits up.
Check it out here. The guides are great, too. Makes any job pretty straight forward. Signup to comment
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