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Comment by VSpike | Hacker News Reader

My boss seems unusually sensitive to high-frequency noise, and said if I got a Dell laptop for work he'd refuse to sit next to me (which would be a bad thing because I like him!)

I'd not heard of the "coil whine" or "CPU whine" thing before but Google seemed to show a lot of anecdotal evidence and discussion, especially for the XPS 13 but also for other models.

Does anyone know why Dell seems so prone to this, and if the problem has been solved in newer models?

Otherwise if I want to ditch the work Macbook for a Linux system (which I'd love to do ... I have not grown to enjoy OSX) then my only real choice would be Lenovo.

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joining in on the OT discussion:

You can try to fix high frequency coil vibrations by dousing the responsible component in hot glue or something comparable (the denser the material, the better).

Identifying the part is pretty easy: use a good microphone, put it in a paper tube to make it more directional and move it around the mainboard while observing the spectrum with the audio software of your choice.

I fixed my CRT this way, a looong time ago. I strapped it down with cable ties too, IIRC. Worked like a charm.

> Otherwise if I want to ditch the work Macbook for a Linux system

Year-old MacBook Pros typically make fairly nice Ubuntu machines. The hardware is standard enough that you can find step-by-step installation instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro The biggest limitations in recent years have been (1) no webcam, and (2) somewhat flaky (but still usable) wifi.

It's not as nice as a supported Ubuntu preload directly from your hardware vendor, but you get the nice physical build quality of Apple's hardware.

I may not be able to go with a Linux system at all since company policy is Mac only, but if I ever do manage to do it, I know that they will want me to use (1) not a Mac and (2) not old hardware. Kind of a shame since my research suggested the same: that year or two old Mac was a good hardware platform for Linux. The same to an extent applies to Lenovo hardware and everything else designed primarily for Windows. If it were for personal use, I'd go for an old Thinkpad or old Macbook.

I'm confused, if your company is Mac only, how would you end up sitting next to your boss with a Dell anyway?

There is an open source webcam driver now [1], although it has some problems.

[1] https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

I just returned my XPS 13 developer edition due to the extremly bad "coil whine". It was so bad that I could heare it even with headphones on (different audio source). Also the anounced revision of the mainboard was yet again posponed. Baought a HP specter x360 and I'm very happy with it. Everything worked out of the box with Ubuntu 16.10.

From what I've read the coil whine issue is still there, and it's still a hit or miss thing. Some of them suffer from very audible coil whine, some have none at all.

It's a very unfortunate quality issue that will prevent a lot of people from buying the XPS 13.

They obviously use cheaper components than others, keeping their costs low and profits high! That's business, and people keep buying their stuff anyway, so they made the right decision not to fix this issue (no, it's not been solved).

I'm not sure why Dell is particularly prone to it, but it makes Dell machines unusable for me. I had an Inspiron 8200 through college (14 years ago!) that had very annoying coil whine. Surprised to see it's still a problem.

The E6400 series had it, but so did the T400/T500 ThinkPad line.

This is more of a processor family issue, not laptop manufacturer problem.

I have an XPS 15 and have had no coil whine issues so far, fingers crossed.

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