System Noise Question

[Eric Hubbard]

There's a high-pitched, harsh tone being generated somewhere in my system. I've tried two different sound cards, so that's not it. I'm beginning to suspect one of my hard drives or fans. Any suggestions?

Cheers, Eric

[Craig Maier]

Is this high pitch sound ending up on your audio files, comming out of your speakers, or is it just an acoustical vibration comming from the computer?

[Lord Theo]

If it's a hardware problem, it might be either dust accumulation on your cpu fan, or more likely, a wire may have come in contact with the blades of that fan & has to be moved out of harm's way.

[Geebster]

Without a little further information, It literally could be almost anything. All of the reasons Lord Theo addressed could be the root cause, or it could be something else.

I've seen fans, bad slots, motherboards, hard drives, faulty wiring within the PC, power supplies, bad interconnect wires, grounding of the PC, 2 defective sound cards as well as countless other scenarios that have caused similar situations.

Sometimes you just have to try a component at a time to see if it is at fault. I always use a known good PC to try each component; that goes a long way to simplify the procedure.

GB

[Eric Hubbard]

Noise problem solved. It was the sound card. I reinstalled my older ESI sound card, and now the sound is fine. I had to disable the built in sound card in the bios setup. The built in sound card was supposedly hi-quality digital...actually, not so much.

I still have two issues left, one major, one minor. After installing the old sound card, now my system won't recognize a recording device. The other problem is that Mentor won't recognize my burner; I'm pretty certain that it's not a Mentor problem, I think it relates to some other burning software overriding Mentor's burning software, as WMP won't burn either.

After weeks of messing around with this, I'm beginning to think that XP does not allow for clean uninstall and reinstall. It appears that old keys remain in the registry even after uninstall, and interfere with other programs.

[Geebster]

Hi Eric:

Aren't sound devices fun? Ha Ha. I know exactly what you are going through. I had a sound card the other day, that I had to go through all kinds of "hoops" to get it to be installed and recognized properly. Is your driver the latest and greatest? Sometimes that makes a big difference. You may want to check the mfr's website just to be sure.

As far as the burner is concerned; does any of your burning software have a 'drag to disc' module that always is active? I've found that those often interfere with other burning programs.

Just a couple of thoughts. I hope you get your problems nailed down; but keep the faith. It will be worth it in the end.

GB