Occassional Thud + Hard Drive Whir?

Yeah, it definitely could be described as a "clink" or "tick"... that's really why it was difficult to describe over the phone, there's no definite way to phrase it. Just a tiny little blip of sorts and then the hard drive kicks up for a split second.

I tried recording it in Garageband but after about 15 minutes of non-continuous recordings spaced out over the afternoon, it didn't happen once, which might lend some support to your "only during light loads" theory. Still, I'm a student who plans on mostly browsing, doing email, writing papers, and other general low-intensity activities, and I'd hate to be sitting in a library with this thing blipping at me all afternoon.

While writing this post, it blipped twice... thanks guys, anyone else experience anything like this?

Macbook 1.83 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Thanks to everyone who's been contributing to this thread. I couldn't find any reports of this occuring online, but it's nice to know that I'm not the only one annoyed by this.

I'm not particularly worried about this problem, just really annoyed by it. The blips are spaced out just enough so that it's like water torture when you're trying to read something or type. An update:

I took my old Macbook back to the Apple Store and talked to a Genius about it. As it was starting up, we discussed the noise I was hearing, and I told her what I've posted here, that it was a little blip and a split-second harddrive whir coming apparently from the upper-right area of the keyboard. Because it was coming from the upper right, she decided that it wasn't the hard drive, which is located in the lower-right corner. She actually thought that she knew the noise I was talking about, but decided to run a couple of hardware diagnostic tests anyway. After those came out clean, she took my computer into the back room to try to hear the noise while I wandered the Apple Store floor trying to see if the floor models were blipping as well.

A few minutes later, we met back at the bar. I hadn't heard anything, even with one ear covered and the other an inch above the keyboard, but Apple Stores on weekends are pretty loud. She, on the other hand, heard the noise she thought she would hear and explained to me that this is a perfectly normal part of the Intel chips. Apparently, the Core Duo chips blip as a normal part of their function; most people can't hear it, but it sounds like we have a few lucky people on here who can. (This actually isn't the first time in my life I've heard strange electronic things; for example, I can hear the high pitches TVs emit when they're turned on and muted from another room.) She gave me some choices:

I could either keep my old Macbook or exchange it, free of charge, for an unopened Macbook from the back room. Considering that my first Macbook didn't overheat, moo, whine, or melt, it was a tough decision but I thought about it for a second and decided to look at the serial number I would be receiving. It was a 4H623, just like my old one. What did I have to lose? I took the new one, and was told that any future exchanges would entail a monetary penalty.

I took my new computer home optimistically, opened it up, and... well, it's different. I don't think that all Macbooks are created equally. I won't go into great detail about it, but the keys seems to be much higher than they were on the old one, which gives it a noisier, flimsier feeling. Also, the computer seems to run hotter than my old one did, but then again, the old one was very cool. Still, compared to the Macbook Temperature Database, it's nothing off the charts.

As far as the blips are concerned, it still blips. Not quite as loudly and not quite as frequently, but it blips nonetheless. (Maybe I'm just not hearing them as often because of noisier fans/keys.) I don't know what to do at this point... considering I opened it yesterday, I could probably sell it locally for little loss and wait 3 months until Apple gets these things working, comes out with a new model, etc. Or I could just keep it and deal with the blips. I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do yet. But that's what's happened so far. Keep 'em coming...

I listened to the recording you posted a few times and, to tell you the truth, it sounds like we have a different problem. Although it was a bit hard to get a clear idea of what the sound was with the ticking in the background and the fairly loud constant static level, your sounds are much more mechanical/moving-parts grinding than mine are. I am by no means an expert on computer parts, but I've been around dying hard drives and your sound is much more reminiscent of a hard drive than mine is.

My noises are much more similar to a little error beep or something like that. Initially, I even thought that my pops were caused by a piece of software trying to access a server, maybe a Norton utility or something like that. However, the sound is definitely not coming out of the speakers themselves. I have Shure e3c earphones that do a great job of cancelling out noises and amplifying whatever they're plugged into - I didn't hear a thing while idling for a while. When it was blipping after a total reformat and then still blipping after software updates, though, I pretty much ruled out the phantom software theory.

At this point, the most probable theory that I've heard is actually that the chips themselves beep as a part of standard operating procedure. The manager of the Apple Store told me as he handed me my new Macbook that "this one will pop, your last one popped, your next one is going to pop, and there's nothing we can do about that." Sad but maybe true. Still, I'm not giving up on this. I'll try to get a recording of mine sometime in the next couple of days.