August 2010 Archives
August 22, 2010
Thinkpad DVD Noise
My handy household hint for the weekend:
One problem I've been experiencing with my new(ish) Thinkpad T500 is the large amount of noise made by the DVD drive. It's loud enough to be distracting when watching a film - not quite enough to drown it out, but enough to be clearly heard over even the louder parts until your mind starts filtering it out. The tray rattles against the casing, which makes it much worse. I found the noise could be reduced significantly by squashing one or two bits of folded tissue between then tray and the casing above, but that's a nasty solution.
Of course, there's a proper fix for this. Just go into the BIOS config (press the blue ThinkVantage button when the BIOS boot screen shows up, hold it down until the message goes away, then follow the instructions), and find the options for the CD drive, and set it to "Silent". Problem solved - the drive becomes almost inaudible, and it doesn't seem to have any adverse effect on the playback of DVDs.
One problem I've been experiencing with my new(ish) Thinkpad T500 is the large amount of noise made by the DVD drive. It's loud enough to be distracting when watching a film - not quite enough to drown it out, but enough to be clearly heard over even the louder parts until your mind starts filtering it out. The tray rattles against the casing, which makes it much worse. I found the noise could be reduced significantly by squashing one or two bits of folded tissue between then tray and the casing above, but that's a nasty solution.
Of course, there's a proper fix for this. Just go into the BIOS config (press the blue ThinkVantage button when the BIOS boot screen shows up, hold it down until the message goes away, then follow the instructions), and find the options for the CD drive, and set it to "Silent". Problem solved - the drive becomes almost inaudible, and it doesn't seem to have any adverse effect on the playback of DVDs.
