Unusual Entourage Issue - Physical Squealing from the Mac!

[Aasdlk ASdlk]

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone has encountered this problem before out there,
but here it is. I am the proud owner of a 1 year old 17" Powerbook 1.5
GHZ with 2GB of RAM machine. This is a wonderful machine with 30GB
hard drive free, fully tested and burnt in RAM, extremely stable (only
four crashes in the past year - panics due to bad Virtual PC drivers
and a beta kernel extension that I tried to play with), and awesome
performance. I love it.

Now, we come to a nagging issue. With Entourage 2004 (even a clean
installation on Mac 10.3.9 or Mac 10.4.2), I encounter a real physical
squealing sound from my Mac when the Entourage program is synching with
my work's Exchange server. I am connected to the Exchange server using
WebDAV. The squealing only happens when the Entourage software is in a
"frozen" state which it gets into about every four to five minutes when
synching with the Exchange server. The little blue and white
horizontal, rotating "barber shop" pole will stop moving and will
usually do that on "Inbox". At which point there will be a noticeable
squeal emitted from the Mac until Entourage "wakes up" and continues
the operation. I have found that even putting the speakers on mute
does not get rid of the sound and of course does nothing for the
freezing.

Any thoughts from anyone out there? I have never in my years playing
with computers encountered software that would cause a physical squeal
from the machine if the speakers were on mute.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Oh, by the way, Entourage and
Panther/Tiger have all had the latest updates installed when I tried
this and no other programs have been running. However, CPU usage has
pumped up to 100% when Entourage is frozen and squealing like that.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

[mmmmark]

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone has encountered this problem before out there, but
here it is. I am the proud owner of a 1 year old 17" Powerbook 1.5 GHZ
with 2GB of RAM machine. This is a wonderful machine with 30GB hard drive
free, fully tested and burnt in RAM, extremely stable (only four crashes
in the past year - panics due to bad Virtual PC drivers and a beta kernel
extension that I tried to play with), and awesome performance. I love it.

Now, we come to a nagging issue. With Entourage 2004 (even a clean
installation on Mac 10.3.9 or Mac 10.4.2), I encounter a real physical
squealing sound from my Mac when the Entourage program is synching with my
work's Exchange server. I am connected to the Exchange server using
WebDAV. The squealing only happens when the Entourage software is in a
"frozen" state which it gets into about every four to five minutes when
synching with the Exchange server. The little blue and white horizontal,
rotating "barber shop" pole will stop moving and will usually do that on
"Inbox". At which point there will be a noticeable squeal emitted from
the Mac until Entourage "wakes up" and continues the operation. I have
found that even putting the speakers on mute does not get rid of the sound
and of course does nothing for the freezing.

Any thoughts from anyone out there? I have never in my years playing with
computers encountered software that would cause a physical squeal from the
machine if the speakers were on mute.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Oh, by the way, Entourage and
Panther/Tiger have all had the latest updates installed when I tried this
and no other programs have been running. However, CPU usage has pumped up
to 100% when Entourage is frozen and squealing like that.

Best Regards,
Eric

How much RAM do you have? It sounds like it may be churning away trying to
use virtual memory, accessing your hard drive. If it is making that much
noise (and if this is the problem) I'd be worried about its long term
viability. The other possibility is that a fan is causing the noise. Both
of these situations would explain why the noise isn't coming out of the
speakers.

My flat-panel imac has also been known to make chirping noises when I have
too many Safari tabs open (like >20-30). It seems to be in my unscientific
opinion to be hard disk access.

Let us know if you figure anything out.

-Mark

 

[Craig Deutsch]

For whatever it's worth, my PowerMac G5 squeals, too - but it's quite
clearly a video thing. Certain applications, particularly when re-drawing
screens (i.e., the iTunes patchwork album cover screen saver is the worst
offender), cause something inside my Mac to squeal...sounds like a squeaky
hamster wheel, for example -- and it's NOT coming from the speakers.

I'm told it's the video card working overtime to render what it needs. Have
NO understanding of what actually physically makes the noise as they're
aren't any moving parts aside from fans.

It is kind of a mystery. Anyone physicists or electrical engineers out
there with a plausible explanation?

 

[Aasdlk ASdlk]

Hi there,

I don't know if anyone has encountered this problem before out there,
but here it is. I am the proud owner of a 1 year old 17" Powerbook 1.5
GHZ with 2GB of RAM machine. This is a wonderful machine with 30GB
hard drive free, fully tested and burnt in RAM, extremely stable (only
four crashes in the past year - panics due to bad Virtual PC drivers
and a beta kernel extension that I tried to play with), and awesome
performance. I love it.

Now, we come to a nagging issue. With Entourage 2004 (even a clean
installation on Mac 10.3.9 or Mac 10.4.2), I encounter a real physical
squealing sound from my Mac when the Entourage program is synching with
my work's Exchange server. I am connected to the Exchange server using
WebDAV. The squealing only happens when the Entourage software is in a
"frozen" state which it gets into about every four to five minutes when
synching with the Exchange server. The little blue and white
horizontal, rotating "barber shop" pole will stop moving and will
usually do that on "Inbox". At which point there will be a noticeable
squeal emitted from the Mac until Entourage "wakes up" and continues
the operation. I have found that even putting the speakers on mute
does not get rid of the sound and of course does nothing for the
freezing.

Any thoughts from anyone out there? I have never in my years playing
with computers encountered software that would cause a physical squeal
from the machine if the speakers were on mute.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Oh, by the way, Entourage and
Panther/Tiger have all had the latest updates installed when I tried
this and no other programs have been running. However, CPU usage has
pumped up to 100% when Entourage is frozen and squealing like that.

Best Regards,
Eric

Hi all you Mac lovers out there,

You might have encountered some freezing and physical squealing in
Entourage when synching with the MS Exchange servers (using WebDAV).
Here is how I described it recently:

With Entourage 2004 (even a clean installation on Mac 10.3.9 or Mac
10.4.2), I encounter a real physical squealing sound from my Mac when
the Entourage program is synching with my work's Exchange server. I am
connected to the Exchange server using WebDAV. The squealing only
happens when the Entourage software is in a "frozen" state which it
gets into about every four to five minutes when synching with the
Exchange server. The little blue and white horizontal, rotating
"barber shop" pole will stop moving and will usually do that on
"Inbox". At which point there will be a noticeable squeal emitted from
the Mac until Entourage "wakes up" and continues the operation. I have
found that even putting the speakers on mute does not get rid of the
sound and of course does nothing for the freezing.

Now, just after posting this to the newsgroups, I found another site
with a recommended solution for this issue: Putting the
/~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ folder into the Privacy section of
Spotlight. Now, since Entourage doesn’t yet support spotlight
searching, there really isn’t any major reason for Spotlight to try to
access that folder. However, for some reason, Spotlight will try to
access that folder to search the big DB file from Entourage every time
there is a change in the file. Once I disabled that by putting the MUD
folder into the Privacy section, the freezing and squealing went away.
Just a helpful hint for Entourage users. Of course, this doesn’t
explain the problems I had with Panther, but there you go – technology
isn’t easy to explain sometimes.

Thanks,
Eric