Computer is noisy

[winston]

My 3 year old computer has started making noises. I'm a novice. What causes this?
THanks,

[JayMan]

It depends what sort of noises its making. try to describe them.

It could be a fan rattling/vibrating, could be the harddisk etc........

JayMan

[daverme]

It surely is coming from one of the rotating parts, either a fan or a disk. As JayMan said, a fan might have come loose and is vibrating or it could be that a bearing in a motor is going bad or a combination of the two.

First, the obvious stuff: Does the noise go away if you remove the CDs from the CD-ROM drive? If it does then the problem is in the CD-ROM drive. The same would apply to the floppy drive.

You can eliminate the fans quite easily. Turn the PC off then stick a pencil between the blades of the power supply fan then turn the PC on. If the noise goes away, it's the power supply fan (remove the pencil after a few seconds). If it's not the power supply fan then remove the cover from the PC's case and locate the CPU cooling fan. Just press your finger gently against the center of the fan for a few seconds, with just enough pressure to make it stop. If the noise goes away then you've found the culprit. If your PC has a chassis fan, check it out as well.

If it's none of the above then try tightening all the mounting screws for all the disk drives, especially the hard drive and the CD-ROM drive.

If none of these gets you the answer then you just might have a hard drive that's going bad and I would suggest replacing it.

Now, having said all that, let me add this: my daughter started complaining a coupla years ago about her PC making noise. I even heard it once; it was a hellasious rattling noise! However, we never did anything about it and it never failed. Go figure !!!

[krusty the klown]

Cheap CPU fans often have weak sleeve bearings that do have a limited lifespan.

Once they start to rattle, the bearing's knackered and soon the thing will die altogether.

If you find it's the CPU fan, replace the heatsink + fan assembly ASAP - if that fan fails it could take out the CPU and the cost of a replacement cheap (but get one with a ball bearing fan) cooler will only be a few bux.

[JayMan]

Winston i noticed in another topic u have the same question, but the there you say its comming from your speakers? This could be cause by many things also, electronic interference could cause this. Do you have fluerescent lights? Any new tv's or stereos been added when this noise started? Alternatively it could just be the amp in the speakers going bad. I had a set of speakers that where excellent, one day they started making a "humm" noise, and i'd burnt out a couple of componants in the amp.

Also it could be your soundcard, do you have another sound card you could try? Or even just plug the speaker into a discman or something to see if they make the same noise?

edit: for those interested winstons other post was in the tech support forum, there he describes the noise as a high ringing comming from the speakers. This may help someone help with the problem.

JayMan

[This message has been edited by JayMan (edited 02-06-2001).]