VanguardLH wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:

This is a strange one. Once in awhile, and seemingly at random, I hear a
brief chirp from the laptop. It is very infrequent. I've run the SMART
and hard disk utilities, which show no issues there, but granted, that's
limited in what it can test in that regard. I do know it's not coming
through my audio system, as I had that muted for one test, so presumably
it's from the hard drive, or perhaps PSU electronics.

I've read online that some others have had this issue too, and have lived
with it, but no one seemed to know what it was caused by. Apparently it
is not necessarily an indicator of a failing hard drive, which tends to
be more frequent in its sounds. My question is, has anybody else ever
encountered this? Again, it sounds like a rather brief bird chirp.

Rather than muting a powered external speaker set, unpower th external
speakers. If they aren't powered external speakers (just use the little
voltage coming from the audio jack on the PC), unplug the speakers from
the PC. With the speakers unpowered or disconnected (rather than
muted), see if you still hear the chirping.

Does your motherboard have an onboard piezoelectric speaker?

Have you tried disabling the power options for the hard disk(s) so they
don't spin down or otherwise go into low-power mode? Use a high-
performance power plan (i.e., no power savings) to see if the chirping
goes away.

Thanks. I think that may have done it. No external audio speakers, just
using the built in ones. But I noticed the HD was set to turn off the HD
after 20 minutes in the "advanced" power settings, and I now set that to
never (with AC power).