Quit your whining!

This just reinforces my decision that I'm never going to buy another desktop computer again. Just laptops or unconfigurable iMacs for me from now on so other people can deal with the troubleshooting and heartache.

Anyways, on to the problem of the day. My computer has been emitting high pitch whines for over half year now. I've had noise issues before so when this first started I pulled apart the case to try to find the source of irritation. I then proceeded to go through all the usual suspects; stray cables, dodgy case fans, dying harddrives, oscillating graphics cards. After a brief search I promptly gave it up to gremlins and didn't really mind as the noise seemed to go away the minute Windows finished booting up.

Fast forward to last weekend and imagine my horror at being greeted to that familiar whining after coming back from work. The PC was running in Windows and no amount of case shaking seemed to alleviate the problem. Reboot... nope it still won't stop shrieking. Bowing my head in defeat I did the unthinkable. I shut down my PC.

Now there's nothing worse to a geek like myself than having a nicely set up study with a dead computer. So after another long day at work today I figured it was time to roll up my sleeves and go another round with the wailing beast. Not that I had any ideas; checked fans, checked hard drive, checked cabling. I even disconnected the graphics card to see if that made a difference.

And then I noticed that the sound actually changed pitch as I disconnected various devices. What would do that? Surely not... no... better check the motherboard manual... unplug component... sound stops. It was the blooming PC Speaker. >_<