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From: wade@sdacs.ucsd.EDU (Wade Blomgren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: a different kind of SE screen quirk
Message-ID: <458@sdacs.ucsd.EDU>
Date: Mon, 19-Oct-87 16:56:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdacs.458
Posted: Mon Oct 19 16:56:05 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Oct-87 23:38:52 EDT
References: <1660@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: UCSD Academic Computing Services
Lines: 29

In article <1660@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, (Adam B Rosen) writes:
> I haven't seen this one mentioned, though it happens on my SE with hard disk
> and two of my friends' machines with double floppies.  When scrolling through
> a large document, say in Word (any version) or downloading text via modem,
> as the print scrolls up the screen the Mac makes a very faint 'pulsing'
> noise with each line, vaguely reminiscent of an old teletype banging to the
> next line.  It's a combination squeak and hissing sound, which is almost
> (but not quite) drowned out by that 'ear splitting' fan so many people have
> mentioned.  Any other noise in the room, such as stereos or conversation, will
> drown it out, so check for this in quiet locations.
> 
> Has anyone else experienced this, or is this problem unique to these 3 Macs?

I most definitely have this same "problem" with my MacSE. Absolutely ANY 
program that scrolls text in a window causes this faint "screeching" or 
screaming.  As Adam says, it is not really loud enough to be too annoying. (It 
certainly does not anger me as much as my wiggling screen). An acquaintance of 
mine, upon hearing the description of this problem, surmised that it could 
actually be the 68000 processor (or the ROM?) doing the screaming, as the 
tightly looped set of ScrollRect calls is executed. He had seen a similar 
thing in a lab full of AT&T boxes. (Meaning that there was some fairly common 
activity that started those processors humming).  Harmonics in the silicon...
hmmm. A modestly loud stereo is the best solution I have found.

Regardless of the cause of this particular glitch (avoidable or not),
I am not impressed with the QC on the Macintosh SE.

Wade Blomgren
wade@sdacs.ucsd.edu