# My macbook pro was beeping like a bomb...?



## mackeral (May 23, 2009)

My Mac started beeping at me the other day and I am hoping that somebody can tell me why as it was definitely abnormal beeping.

I have a macbook pro 15 inch aluminum unibody that was the latest model when I bought it back in January this year. It came with 4GB of ram and a 300GB HD. I have not added any ram or changed the hard drive or added any third party hardware to the computer. I am running Mac OS 10.5.7 which I updated about a week ago without a problem. 

The computer had been going with with nothing unusual and I was browsing the internet in Safari when suddenly I heard this disturbing beeping coming from my mac. The sound was quite short and quite loud. It reminded me of the beeps made by macs when you reset the pram. The beeps were quite random. sometimes occuring close together like a countdown and at other times being spaced unevenly apart by a few minutes. The beeps seemed to become less frequent when I disconnected from airport and more frequent when I reconnected. Eventually I changed user and then left my computer for a time and then changed back to the affected user and the beeps had stopped.

The beeps were definitely not my system alert sound as it sounded quite different. Also they didn't respond to changing the system volume, whereas my alert sound did. I ran disk first aid and it came up with nothing. 

The only unusual thing is that later that day I was watching a movie on my computer while unconnected to the power supply and my computer ran out of battery life. Instead of going to sleep it shutdown. I restarted it after connecting it to the power supply and there was no problem.

Does anybody have any clues as to what might be going on?


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## djackmac (May 23, 2009)

Disco all connected peripherals and see what happens. It sounds like hardware otherwise. It sounds like its still covered under warranty so if it needs to go in, just make sure you do a time machine backup first as any shop you take it to will more than likely send it to Apple depot for repair.


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## mackeral (May 23, 2009)

There were no Peripherals attached when it happened. It happened again today but only after I started up Safari and it stopped when I quit it. I did a web search for safari beeping, and found some other users who have reported a similar problem but these were all at least a year old and there were no adequate explanations. One person mentioned turning off voice over in universal access, but it is already turned off on this computer.


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## SGilbert (May 23, 2009)

Do you happen to have a cell phone near by?  It's a known fact/problem that the 2 don't react well in close proximity.


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## theschtickler (May 23, 2009)

I just had the same thing then. I'm on 10.5.7 and I was in Safari too when it was beeping. Had this machine my MBP for 18 months and never had this happen before.

Anyone?


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## mackeral (May 23, 2009)

Nope, there was no cell phone near by either times it happened. 

Just now I started up from the Install disk and did a hardware diagnostic with the extended setting on and it found no trouble. Fsck found no trouble, and the smart status on the harddrive is verified, which I gather is normal.

I'm in Safari now and there is no beeping. 

???


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## Satcomer (May 24, 2009)

mackeral said:


> Nope, there was no cell phone near by either times it happened.
> 
> Just now I started up from the Install disk and did a hardware diagnostic with the extended setting on and it found no trouble. Fsck found no trouble, and the smart status on the harddrive is verified, which I gather is normal.
> 
> ...



Start Dashboard back up. I say this because it might be a Dashboard widget that is making a sound because it made me curious that it stopped upon a restart.


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## mackeral (May 24, 2009)

I will try loading dashboard today and I see if it does anything. The sound the computer made was not affected by the system volume and it wasn't any kind of alert sound. Wouldn't sounds made by dashboard be affected by the system volume?


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## Satcomer (May 25, 2009)

Dashboard doesn't but a third party widget might.


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## chevy (May 25, 2009)

I would suggest a combo update. Even if you stay at the same system edition, it can repair a lot of small things that make the difference between a crappy system and a stable system.


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