Arch Linux

bgc1954

Member

From: Edmonton, AB, Canada

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 1,160

T21 hard drive or CPU whine?

Hi all,

This has been bugging me for some time now and I stumbled upon a solution recently.  I have been quite happily using Arch on my old Thinkpad T21 for a few years now.  A while back I must have been bored and decided to try some other distros on old reliable to perhaps learn a little something.  I repartitioned my drive to add a small 6 gig partition and went at it.

I've tried several debian-based distros, slackware, crux et al but the constant problem I've had has been that everything but Arch caused an annoying high-pitched whine which seemed to correspond to the hard drive load but I guess it could be the cpu as well as I've recently discovered googleing away.

Apparently, on my T21 anyway, what made the difference was disabling CPU power management in the BIOS settings--so I guess it is cpu whine.  I've looked for this solution for some time but just recently stumbled on this while googleing.  It might have had something to do with being convinced it was the hard drive--wrong search parameters?  I believe I've always been searching for hard drive whine and for some reason I just did a general laptop whine search and got a few more posts to read through.

Like I said, Arch has never given me this problem and pretty much every other linux distro has exhibited that annoying whine.  I wonder what Arch does differently?  Another reason why Arch is my distro of choice.

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: T21 hard drive or CPU whine?

Depending on what distros you tried, they may automatically add tools like cpufreq, laptop-mode or something similar, which have to be added manually in Arch?