

I suspect this is the culprit, but couldn't find anything online.

I also noticed that any wifi traffic seems to trigger high CPU usage. It was good for about a day after installing the version 18.40 wifi driver, but the noises came back. I have already uninstalled the that device driver and downloaded the 18.40 (most recent) one from Lenovo.

The only thing I remember I changed recently is to hit the "Update Driver" button on the Wifi device in "Device Manager". With the noises, the mouse becomes sluggish and video playback experiences small pauses, too. I noticed that there are scratchy noises and very noticeable sound distortion with Wifi traffic on my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 3rd Gen) starting about 3 days ago.
