I thought my CG5 was noisy too...until I heard a Meade!
An interesting "feature" I found with the CGE, which may have worked on the CG5, is picking alignment stars. Often I would find I can easily identify 2 in the west and only 1 in the east, but it wanted 1 in the west and 2 in the east! If I press the Menu button on the CGE, it switches over. I had sold it before I found this out, does the CG5 do this? This used to be really frustrating some times.
I don't think it is in the manual as I recall....