Frequently, I will be sitting quietly in my room. Suddenly, a strange noise, like some sort of electronic rumble/creak will emanate from my desktop computer. This is usually followed a few seconds later by my cell phone going off. What the heck is this noise?
sigh
No more early morning (sort of) typing for me.
that should be “cause”, not “casue”.
It’s pretty much what you might quess - the pre-phone call handshaking between the phone and its tower, being picked up by the speakers on your system.
“Dude! This is the tower, you still there?”
“Yep. What do you want?”
“Got a call for you.”
etc.
You’ll also hear a quick blip-blip sound occasionally, not accompanied by any ring. This is the routine handshaking of the phone letting the tower know its location.
This should only happen when the phone is pretty close to the speakers.
charizard, I just wanted to say that’s one of the BEST explanations I’ve heard of this in a long time!! Thanks!! 
Or, in the case of my girlfriend’s phone, when you’re sitting on the couch 5 or 6 feet from the TV.
Sometimes, it’s the tiniest of noises that bother me.
Why does the phone need to tell the tower its location if there’s no incoming call? Does this mean that a person carrying a cell phone can be located to a certain area (namely, the cell s/he’s in) even though the phone isn’t used? (How large are cells, anyway?)
BTW, this happens with any audio device (Walkman, etc.), not just computers. And only GSM phones make sounds when there’s no call.
Is it a Nextel phone? I used to have this happen constantly with my Nextel phone, never any other cellular phone (between my wife and me, we’ve had several over the years). I used to get noise from anything that had speakers. It was driving me nuts when I heard it in the car until I realized it was coming out of the speakers. It wasn’t just when the phone was about to ring, but that was the most frequent time.
Because if the tower doesn’t know where the phone is, then how is it going to route the call to it?
Cells are limited in maximum size by the range of the tower and minimum size by how far apart the cells are placed. In dense cities, cells are sometimes as small as a 100m IIRC.
Its mainly my girlfriend’s phone that does it. Its a Nokia, using CIngular service.
Thanks, that explanation is pretty much what I had hypothesized. I can live with it, especially when I get treated like some kind of God with ESP when I can hand her the phone before it rings.
Absolutely. If you carry a cell phone that’s turned on (even if no calls are made or received), “they” could track your movements if “they” cared to, just by keeping a log of the routine handshaking signals.
“They” might even narrow it down to smaller than a cell’s radius by watching for multi-tower hits.
I’m saying, when there is no call. When there is no call, the tower doesn’t need to route one. Why doesn’t the tower just locate the phone when there is a call.
Also, how often does the tower want to know where the phone is, when there are no calls?
Imagine the amount of traffic that each tower would have to generate if EVERY time you got a call on your cell phone, EVERY tower in the US had to look for your particular phone.
It’d be like your mom trying to find you at every house of everyone you know. It’s a lot easier and efficient if you just call your mom and say “hey, I’m at so-and-so’s house”. Now multiply that by millions of moms trying to find millions of kids.