Closed Bug 186966 Opened 22 years ago Closed 22 years ago

Distinct humming sound ONLY when using Chimera

Categories

(Camino Graveyard :: General, defect)

PowerPC
macOS
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: Wiblemo, Assigned: saari)

References

Details

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021104 Chimera/0.6 I am using a Titanium Powerbook G4/667 (running Mac OS 10.2.3) and whenever I launch Chimera, I notice a continuous small humming (or buzzing) sound coming from my computer. This sound is ONLY noticeable when I am using Chimera, not any other applications (including other browsers). The sound is noticeable even when I "minimize" Chimera into the dock. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Test made on Titanium PowerBook G4/500 OSX 10.2.3, no particular noise for me. What are all your sound/alarm settings in System Preferences ?
Uh, are you sure this is not your hard drive fan or something?
I have continued to try and isolate this problem. It is definitely not related to sounds or alerts. It seems as if (and this is speculation), that Chimera is constantly accessing my hard drive whereas other applications do not do this. I can hear the same noise, albeit much less pronounced, when I open other applications, but it quickly disappears. With Chimera, it is constantly present. There is one EXCEPTION, however, which may be helpful in isolating the problem. Whenever I surf to a new page in Chimera, the sound disappears for just a brief second before the page is loaded.
Here is a tool which may help you identify the problem. 1. Launch Chimera. 2. Find it's PID using top, ps or Process Viewer 3. In the Terminal, enter the following command: % sudo fs_usage ChimeraPID (replace the obvious part :), (enter password, when asked) fs_usage will, in great detail, show Chimera's system activities, including file accesses.
Thank you David for your suggestion. I can now tell you that Chimera is not accessing the system any more than it needs to. I'm also certain that this is an isolated problem since only one other user (so far as I have found) has reported the same thing happening on his machine (also a Titanium PowerBook). The "pronounced" buzzing does have something to do with Chimera (in other programs it is exists, but it is very muted). At this point, I'm at a loss--this is a strage problem.
I have a humming sound when the screen saver 'Flurry' included in 10.2.3 is running, with or without Chimera running. It's not the hard disk sound, it's a very tiny sound, almost don't hear it unless you are looking for that problem and it's not linked to 'sound settings': alert, volume, etc.
It is definitely a faint sound--it isn't noticeable when there is background noise in the room. I can say with almost 100% certainty that the sound is the same as Stephane describes when running the screen saver "Flurry." The interesting thing is, however, that the sound does not go away when I "dock" Chimera or have no Chimera windows open. As long as Chimera is running, the sound is there. As soon as I quit Chimera, the sound disappears.
Try giving your machine a hard slap on the side, or something ;) Seriously, i've no idea why only Chimera would cause this. And unless you ship us your machine to test on, it ain't gonna get fixed. Sorry.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 22 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
I have the identical setup described in this bug report and submitted a bug yesterday only I thought it was more of a buzz than a hum, so I didn't find this bug until today. So I can further corroborate that this is an issue with the PB 667. If I had to guess at the cause, I'd say that Chimera seems to have a timed loop of some kind that hits a resonant frequency in the motherboard's circuitry causing some component to hum more loudly than normal. This is sheer speculation but the only explanation I can think of at the moment.
If one of you guys wants to build chimera from source, I can point you to a few places where you could tune some numbers.
*** Bug 187496 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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