I was fortunate to get a new laptop at work recently. I took my time on a long weekend configuring it to my satisfaction, but was annoyed by an annoying “pop” noise coming from the speakers after every sound. A little further testing showed that this was only when the machine was on battery power. This post on notebookreview and this post on the OpenSuse forums point to incorrect power management settings for the sound hardware. There really isn’t much out there about this, until you start searching for SoundMax popping issues. This led me to a new driver for the T61 - which has fixed the popping noise. This is my first experience using Lenovo’s site for drivers and downloads… and it’s great. I didn’t have to read through any readmes to clearly see what had changed in each driver revision - and that a “clicking noise” had been fixed in a past driver revision.

Is this news? No. I’m a happy guy though and will look at Lenovo laptops in the future from this experience. Keep it up Lenovo!