For the most part computers are predictable machines. They do more or less what we ask of them. Sometimes they may do things we’d prefer they didn’t but it’s usually for predictable reasons.
My work laptop, on the other hand, is haunted. I know that seems unlikely but it is. See, it plays a sound sometimes. It’s a phantom sound. This sound, as far as I can tell, doesn’t exist anywhere on the machine. But it plays, and it does so randomly. It comes through the speakers, that’s for certain. If the volume is up I can hear it quite easily. If the volume is muted I can’t hear it. Sometimes it happens every minute or so. Sometimes every 5 minutes and sometimes longer.
Apparently I’m not the only one who has this particular ghost in the machine. This forum post describes it perfectly and the bright person managed to record it! That’s the sound! But neither he nor anyone else in the thread have managed to figure out what causes it. And I completely refuse to spend $10 (!) to register on the Something Awful forums to participate in the discussion.
So, dear reader(s)… what the hell is this sound?
Yep. That’s the same sound that one of my laptops made. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 or 9100. My newer 9400 and M6300 laptops have never produced “the sound.”
It’s absolutely coming from the speakers and muting the audio will not help. Drove me nuts. It happened with both Windows and RedHat Linux. In fact, on Linux, I uninstalled the kernel sound driver as a test… and it STILL happened.
I’m convinced that it’s a fundamental hardware problem where some spurious signal bleeds through to the speakers; or, it’s an EMI issue that causes the hiss/pop. In fact, I suppose that it could be a combination of the two. Some external signal may be triggering the hardware problem.
It used to happen more when I was working around high-powered radars, but I’m just speculating about their effect on “the sound.”
Sorry, man… it’s not a ghost