Hello. Having found a nice offer on a 17" Core2Duo iMac on the Apple Refurb store, I have just upgraded the house Apple (which was a G3 Powerbook running Tiger with XPF ;-) with the aim of making it a primary workstation. As far as general performance, I'm very much impressed. However, after 3 days of usage, I notice 2 noises, and I'm not sure whether they're *expected*:
(1) After I put it to sleep or shutdown - well, whenever the AC is plugged in - a high pitched whine from the back of the machine near the top. Someone mentioned this in the archives, but didn't seem to get back on resolution. I know this is not rare for PSUs, but should I expect it on my iMac?
(2) Despite comments everywhere about Intel iMacs being "silent" when idling, this one is certainly audible throughout an otherwise silent (in the living-in-the-country no-noises-whatsoever sense) room. It sounds fairly quiet - certainly more so than any other computer with moving parts I've had here - but there is also some vibration perhaps from bottom left making a slight buzz.
(3) When I shut down/sleep, at least half the time, as the fans spin down I hear maybe two dozen clicks on LHS of machine: playing card in the bicycle wheel type sound.
The vibration of (2) combined with (3) make me wonder whether one fan there needs swapping out. But I know I have annoyingly sensitive hearing, so if (3) is actually expected, this might not be sufficient evidence of anything. Since it's a refurb, I guess they're more likely to want to fix than find another similar one.. in which case, is it worth finding a service provider, since they might swap out a part on-site in a few hours? I'm near Brighton, England which seems to have a rich choice of "authorised service providers" (Cancom, Robert Harding, Solutions) - any suggestions?
More info: iStat Pro gives me temps 30-40oC, fans all running ~1200rpm on idle, up to 1800rpm (fans sound higher frequency, but not really much louder) if I run a couple of shell scripts on infinite loops for a few minutes. Done the all-leads-out-for-30-seconds PMU/SMC/whatever-it-is-now reset and 3*command-option-P-R. Hardware test OK. As for possibility of resonance: I am resting it on a mouse mat, and holding hand on bottom-left doesn't appear to change the sound. In case I'm mistaking fan sounds for dodgy HDD sounds I checked smartctl output and saw nothing untoward (not beyond the usual strange results Seagate drives reports, anyway).
Thanks for reading
.
(1) After I put it to sleep or shutdown - well, whenever the AC is plugged in - a high pitched whine from the back of the machine near the top. Someone mentioned this in the archives, but didn't seem to get back on resolution. I know this is not rare for PSUs, but should I expect it on my iMac?
(2) Despite comments everywhere about Intel iMacs being "silent" when idling, this one is certainly audible throughout an otherwise silent (in the living-in-the-country no-noises-whatsoever sense) room. It sounds fairly quiet - certainly more so than any other computer with moving parts I've had here - but there is also some vibration perhaps from bottom left making a slight buzz.
(3) When I shut down/sleep, at least half the time, as the fans spin down I hear maybe two dozen clicks on LHS of machine: playing card in the bicycle wheel type sound.
The vibration of (2) combined with (3) make me wonder whether one fan there needs swapping out. But I know I have annoyingly sensitive hearing, so if (3) is actually expected, this might not be sufficient evidence of anything. Since it's a refurb, I guess they're more likely to want to fix than find another similar one.. in which case, is it worth finding a service provider, since they might swap out a part on-site in a few hours? I'm near Brighton, England which seems to have a rich choice of "authorised service providers" (Cancom, Robert Harding, Solutions) - any suggestions?
More info: iStat Pro gives me temps 30-40oC, fans all running ~1200rpm on idle, up to 1800rpm (fans sound higher frequency, but not really much louder) if I run a couple of shell scripts on infinite loops for a few minutes. Done the all-leads-out-for-30-seconds PMU/SMC/whatever-it-is-now reset and 3*command-option-P-R. Hardware test OK. As for possibility of resonance: I am resting it on a mouse mat, and holding hand on bottom-left doesn't appear to change the sound. In case I'm mistaking fan sounds for dodgy HDD sounds I checked smartctl output and saw nothing untoward (not beyond the usual strange results Seagate drives reports, anyway).
Thanks for reading
.