Laptop sizzle noise

I am trying to troubleshoot why my newish laptop is whisper quiet when running other linux distros, but when qubes os is installed even at the loading screen i hear a sizzle noise emanating from under the keypad and loudest at the RJ45 port, the fans can be ruled out as they are quiet even running fast in other distros (Most common cause of laptop noise complaints) and the speakers can also be ruled out as i have disconnected the speaker cable for troubleshooting purposes, i know posting here is a long shot but if anyone has any ideas on why qubes os presents this annoying issue but other distros do not and anyway to mitigate it would be great, thanks.

Could you tell us which laptop do you have exactly? Perhaps you could also put the HCL report here.

Is it coil whine? A couple of years ago, I saw a Thinkpad Carbon X1 making such noise. I wouldn’t know why it comes up under a Qubes installation and not under other OSes.

@User103
How have you solved it?

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I have such noise on Thinkpad T16, too.
In GNU/Linux everything is fine, in Qubes OS - electric noise.

@User103, welcome!

I edited your first post to restore the original question based on the edit history, and did the same with the title. my best to find a title to match (I can’t see what the title was before your last edit)

To mark a topic as solved, you can select the post that provided the answer to your question and mark it as the solution. You do that by using the little “checkmark” button that appears after activating the “…” button under any post.

When you so that, the topic get identified as “solved” in listings and the solution is highlighted after the first post.

When none of the replies gave you the answer but you found the solution yourself, writing it down in the topic, and marking that post as the solution is a useful way to help the next person that asks themselves a question similar to yours!

Editing the original post to remove the question is not useful, though, because it removes useful context to all the replies. Same for removing the post title. That is why I opted for restoring them the best I could. I hope that makes sense! :slightly_smiling_face:

In the unlikely case that you edited your question with the hope of making it disappear for some reason, I’m sorry to bring bad news, but this forum is the internet, everything you write here stays forever, and there isn’t much we can do about that. :grimacing: In particular, the post edits are publicly visible, that’s how I was able to restore the original post. (Note that if at any point you have safety concerns, I would recommend getting in touch with the moderation team who’ll do their best to address your concerns with the tools that are available.)

Edit: The title history is publicly available too!

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We buy high-end Thinkpads only to have ridiculous noise problems in them. And Lenovo’s recommendation to “fix” is even more ridiculous: plugging in a pair of headphones.

What is more consequential to our community is that electromagnetically induced acoustic noise / coil whine / audible and inaudible sound from the electronic pieces could in theory be used to exfiltrate data from air gaped laptops or Qubes OS vault and Dom0 by highly resourced actors. This does not apply only to Lenovo. It’s just that repeated coil whine in Lenovo raises questions.

@User103 would be good to know your laptop manufacturer and model.

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Thank you for information and term, it exists in Wikipedia, so quite common.

In my case of Thinkpad T16 (Intel) the noise seems to be louder under Qubes OS than in *ubuntu in idle state. Maybe due to CPU load, or higher disk activity, I do not know.