Noise in brand new Penryn MB Pro?

Question

Hello there,
I just replaced my aging PowerBook G4 with a brand-new MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.6 GHz.
The machine is blazing fast, especially compared to my old laptop. Leopard really sings on this machine, and the display is just gorgeous!
My only question for others who have received these machines and have upgraded from older models is whether you have found, like I do, at least subjectively, that these machines are somewhat noisier than the G4 models they have replaced.
Specifically, hard drive access noise seems a bit more pronounced, that is, you hear more of a hollow, metallic sound coming from the laptop case. this isn't really annoying to me, it's just a bit of a difference from what I'm used to. (My machine has the 250 GB drive in it.)
Second, fan noise, or what I take to be fan noise, seems more pronounced. There is a fairly steady, low pitched hum coming from the right side of the machine, near the right speaker. Sometimes, the pitch of the common will rise, which I'm guessing is the fan speeding up.
I'm trying to figure out whether it's worth taking the machine in to the Apple Store for a once-over by one of their technicians, or is there some other kind of diagnosis I should do at home first to see if these noises are normal?
Other than that, these are gorgeous machines and I am thrilled with mine.

Answer 1

Well, here's the promised update, and it's rather interesting.
I was getting nervous because it appeared that after arriving at the repair depot, my laptop was just sitting there and not getting fixed. After a couple of days of no change in status on the Support website, I called, and an Apple Care representative told me that "the machine is in engineering right now, which doesn't usually happen." But he couldn't tell me what it meant.
The next day, I received an e-mail from someone in Apple Care, letting me know that Apple was going to offer me a choice of resolutions to the situation. According to the e-mail, the engineering department wanted to keep my laptop to be able to further pinpoint the cause of "the failure." If I let them keep my current machine, they would send me a *brand-new replacement laptop* of the same configuration straight from the Apple Store. However, they had no provisions for backing up or transferring whatever data is currently on the machine.
The other option I was given was to allow them to go ahead and repair my current machine. In the end, that's what I decided to do because getting a brand-new machine from the Apple store seems to be another gamble... if that one had a noisy fan, stuck pixels or some other issue, I'd be back to square one.
I promise to report back again when I have my repaired laptop back home... that should be by the early part of next week. I'm sharing this with all of you because it sounds to me as if Apple is becoming aware of some sort of manufacturing flaw in this earliest run of new laptops, causing the noise problems attested to in this thread and others. That's the only way I can explain the engineering department wanting to keep my old unit for further study.
To be continued...