I hear some weird clicking inside my tower

When I type at times. More annoying than anything. I have all the latest antivirus/spy/firwall and update/run them regularly so I don't think it's a keyboard logger. My puter an hp 325c circa 2003 or so. Hp keyboard, relatively new, from a multi media that got hacked two weeks after I bought it, needs a hardrive and I have to order discs from hp. From playing backgammon on yahoo games. Does anyone have any idea why this is. Thank you.
John
LOl, firewall, isn't growing fir just yet.

[edit on 1-1-2008 by jpm1602]

I'd say it's the hard drive. You might want to get a replacement and transfer the data using Norton Ghost or something.

It's the HDD read-write head flopping back and forth likely. If it is it may not last long. Save out your user data. Image it over to a fresh drive. Or do it the HP way, which sucks.

A stuck key can make some PC's seem like what your are describing. Plug in a fresh one they are cheap, so are HDD's. Daddy has an old SGI that clicks funny with the old-old floppies and tape drives, but it's supposed to.

Mira

Sometimes fans can make that noise if there's something stuck in them.

i concur - it's either a failing hard drive or fan. fans will usually give a hum/vibration/grinding noise though. if it's a tick or knocking sound that happens once in a while or happens repetetively every second or so then it's probably the drive. backup everything that's important to you to cd's, dvd's, flash drives, whatever then run a scandisk. right click the hard drive in "my computer" and hit properties. go to the tools tab and click "check now". if it's the drive then it's possible you'll see some bad sectors in the report, although not necessarily. in any case, hard drive knocking is usually due to some read/seek problem.

if it were me i'd leave the cover off of the computer for a while. if the ticking happens you'll be able to get a better idea of where it's coming from.

some fun trivia: the head on a hard drive never actually touches the platters when it's running. the head rides on a cushion of air so close to the platters that not even light can fit through the gap.

anyone else old enough to remember having to manually park the heads before moving a computer? =) that gets done for you automatically now every time you turn the computer off.

anyway, hope you get it figured out!

It's the death chant of your hard disk. Back up all your data and get a new one.

Here's a link with audio recordings of hard drives beginning to fail.

Tick Clack Thunk Click Whir

There is also a built in self-test on your model pc I believe.

Best of luck



[edit on 1/2/08 by makeitso]

reply to post by makeitso


Too cool makeitso! I'll add those diag waves to my collection of tools.

Mira

Very cool makeit so. I will run test. May be getting my multimedia repaired sooner than I thought.