Purchased a laptop - Buzzing noises/power issues

ComradeCalderatza · January 20, 2022

Hello all! Just bought a Razer with a GTX 765m off someone on offer-up for a couple hundred bucks. They, of course, assured me it had no problems. I did what I thought was a thorough lookover before handing off the money, but apparently it wasn't thorough enough.

Now I'm having a bit of buyers remorse, because it seems to have some problems - and I obviously can't get my money back. Hoping that y'all can help me and see if it is something I can fix for cheap, really hoping to use this for uni - considering I literally bought this because my last laptop (that I got from a retailer brand new a few months ago) died on me randomly while watching a youtube video.

I'm not tech illiterate by any means, I build my own desktops and know a decent amount about how computers work (as well as what causes them to breakdown) but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about laptops.

It's hard to contextualize what is related and what may be completely separate issues so I'll give a comprehensive list of everything I've experienced in the first 12 hours I've owned it.

- I brought it home and, after installing chrome, it immediately shut off without any warning or BSOD. I booted it again and it, again, immediately shut down. I tried booting one last time and it hasn't crashed since then (been about 6 hours).

- While unplugged, it will die within 20-30 minutes of operation, no matter what power usage settings it is on.

- When gaming it emits a high pitched buzzing noise, this same noise also persists while scrolling on any website using an external mouse wheel or the onboard mouse pad. When gaming, the sound is ALMOST unbearable. It's not incredibly loud, just very staticy and high pitched. The sound persists with the speakers completely muted so it's not related to that.

- There is a smell emanating from the charger, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it "burning plastic," it is CERTAINLY a smell that I wouldn't call normal - and I also am not SUPER familiar with the smell of burning plastic, so I don't know if I could pinpoint it with reliably high accuracy.

- When I first started trying to configure it, I couldn't edit any settings within the NVIDIA control panel, luckily doing a clean install of all drivers fixed this.

- When I got the computer it was in a refreshed state, and I checked to make sure there wasn't any lingering software from a bad restore, so no issues there.

If anyone could give me any advice that would be great, even if it's just "yes, this is a relatively normal thing with older laptops - it should be fine," I would be okay with that! If it's a power supply issue, I'm sure that'll be easy to find one I can purchase for pretty cheap considering the age of the laptop (Q4 2014 I believe).

If you need any information from me, please let me know. Thanks a ton everyone!

Bombastinator · January 20, 2022

It’s sometimes useful to think of laptops as OEM prebuilts with extra oddities. The power drop sounds like a worn out battery. That’s money. The noise could be coil whine. If so it doesn’t affect operation but can be annoying. Finding out whether it’s coming from the device or the power brick could be useful as power bricks are replacable. If it’s coil whine there is generally very little that can be done though.

I’d personally be tempted to do a full clean install with drive wipe just to make sure there isn’t any inherited cruft. Refresh is a partial reinstall and it doesn’t necessarily remove everything.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Bombastinator