After an update some months ago, my laptop has begun making a low, repeated clicking
sound every few seconds. It is not being generated through the regular
sound system, as altering the volume and even muting the
sound does not make any difference. My regular audio works fine, by the way, so I am guessing this is some sort of PC speaker, since I cannot hear the click when I listen through regular headphones.
Strangely, when I open the
sound settings dialog the click magically disappears. I don't need to change any settings; if I simply leave the dialog open in the background then the problem disappears.
Any ideas what this could be?
I am running regular Ubuntu 12.04, and this is the output from lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio":
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 0349
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 44
Memory at 54200000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
