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Item Subject: Message text A very strange thing happened today. Has anyone else had this happen to them? The ThinkPad 750 monochrome with 20MB RAM and a 170MB hard drive, attached to a Port Replicator I, had been running OS/2 Warp nonstop for days in my dorm room. No shutdowns, a couple of warm boots, but basically uninterrupted operation. Computer was sitting close to an open window. Outside temperature here is about 40-60 degrees F. There's a heater under the window, so the ThinkPad wasn't really cold. About 2pm today I notice a noisy grinding sound coming from the computer. Further investigation reveals that it's coming from the hard drive. Shut down and detach from Port Replicator. Noise persists. Boot to floppy with hard drive removed to make sure that it was the source of the noise. It was. Put the hard drive back in and turn the ThinkPad back on. All the data on the drive seems to be there. At 6pm I put the ThinkPad in my bag and head for a computer lab. It's my job to supervise the lab. Unfortunately the lab only has Macs. Need a real computer for serious work when I'm in there. Plug in the AC adapter (after all, I stay here for 5 hours) and boot the ThinkPad. The noise is still there. Start thinking of how I'll have to wait for a new hard drive over Christmas break. About 9pm the sound stops. Now the hard drive makes the same old whine it used to. What gives? Unrelated noise problem: Probably 5 or 6 times over the life of the computer (about 10 months now, all under heavy use), the built-in speaker has started cackling like an old AM radio. Every time it happened I was running OS/2 2.1. Of course, that's the only OS I ran for a long time. Restarting the system made the noise go away. Annoying, but certainly not worth taking the computer in over. Again, I would appreciate knowing if anyone has experienced either of these problems. I really can't complain too much about durability problems. I know a fellow with a TI TravelMate, and his computer has been known to just quit working for days at a time. On the other hand, I know someone with an ancient Compaq 386/16. It's really sad that their passive-matrix mono screen looks better than mine. PowerBook mono screens look very nice, also. The best mono screen I ever saw was while I was shopping for my ThinkPad. It was a Compaq, and it actually had an active matrix *mono* screen. It really was beautiful. To my eyes, less stressful than color LCD screens. I probably would have bought that computer, but I couldn't get that screen with anything better than a 25MHz processor. Oh well, I guess I'm stuck with this lousy screen for a while. Not too big a deal as I use an IBM 15" color CRT most of the time. I went with a cheap LCD but a nice monitor. Of course, I thought I could upgrade to a color LCD later, but all I've heard about this is that it costs $3000. Has anyone heard about this upgrade? Upgrading the display is on the bottom of my list of toys to buy, but I'm sure there are some users who would appreciate the information Wesley T. Dunaway (dunaway@s9000.furman.edu)