Whine caracteristics

hello, I have a 15'' MacBookPro that has a whine, and I'v been searching in different forums more details about the whines, and how to make them stop.
After some time, I clearly noticed there were many different types of whines, but I didn't find any post that tried to list them. So, in order to better understand the whines, I decided to create this thread.
Here are my whine caracteristics:
- always active when nothing is running (even on account choose window)
- the level is very high (some older people don't hear it) (sorry for the bad english...)
it can be stopped by:
- using a bluetooth mouse (activating bluetooth is not enough)
- running photo booth
- having the power supply plugged in (not always working)
- scrolling the windows
- running under windows (not a good solution...)
After a bit of experimenting, I arrived to the conclusion that the whine is I/O related. Indeed, if any peripherical is running, the whine stops. I think this is why there is no whine under windows; it must keep some I/O devices working, for instance the optical audio input.
I hope this can be helpful, and that others will post their whine caracteristics!

I'd look at the work of the ShhMBP guys, they seem to be getting to the bottom of it. If you haven't, download ShhMBP (came out June 30), it seems to be eliminating the CPU whine for everyone (at the expense of battery life).
Basically, it seems that machines that are whining make the noise when the Core Duo enters it's C4 (deep sleep) state. So, they found from some Intel datasheet that you can write a value to some register to disable the processor from entering this state (if you have taken any basic computer architecture and now any language, you can easily decipher their code). Since this state is for power savings, you see the battery decrease. See http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2693&p=2 (it explains why no whine in Windows).
Now, using your USB devices and Photobooth and the Mirror Widget trick are most likely just not allowing the CPU to enter the C4 state (I'd love to reasearch this, but I'm taking summer classes and my brainpower need be focused on other things).
So it's a tradeoff - the report is a 30 minute battery decrease on an "idle processor" test using ShhMBP. However, since the processor isn't always idle during normal use I think you could practically expect even less battery time decrease. You may also see your processor running slightly hotter.

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    Power Mac G4 APG Graphics   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  
      Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

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