Inspiron High Pitch Noise - My solution

There's been a lot of people posting similar issues with their inspiron.  The sound can be described as a high pitch cricket chirp or metal grinding and apparantly comes from the processor (i.e. around the QWE keys).  My particular sound was produced when I moved an external USB mouse, be it wired or wireless.  It also only happened when I had an external monitor attached to the laptop, however moving the cursor by the touchpad or the stick would not cause the noise.  I originally thought it would be the motherboard or power adapter because whenever I unplugged the power from the computer and ran on batteries, the noise went away.  When I plugged it back in, the noise came back immediately.

 

Dell sent an on-site tech to replace my motherboard and power supply (thanks to the 3-year at-home warranty I purchased).  Neither of them fixed the problem.  The tech seemed to think that it had something to do with the wireless mouse, so we started moving things around.

 

To make a long story short, my problem was caused because I have my usb mouse plugged into a powered D-Link DUB-H4 USB 2.0 4-port hub.  Once I removed the hub from the loop and plugged either mouse (wired or wireless) directly into the computer, the noise went away.  The hub is still connected to my computer and I cannot tell any other adverse effects.

 

Moral of the story... the source of this noise may be anywhere.  Try unplugging everthing external and see if the noise goes away, then systematically replace components one at a time until you find the source.  I doubt this will solve everyone's problem, but I hope it helps a few.

 

Bryan