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Hard drive help

post #1 of 10
7/1/10 at 5:03pm
Thread Starter 
My laptop hdd was making loud noises - performance was fine, just lots of noise coming from it (used to be silent). I took this to be a sign of impending doom so I bought a new drive and used trueimage to set up the new one. new one is just as loud as the old (including what seems to be random read/write activity). is it possible its a windows issue (running win7)?
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post #2 of 10
7/2/10 at 12:26am
Are you running out of memory? Running out of memory can cause the operating system to swap the memory to disk, and therefore, the noises. Did you upgrade to Win 7?
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post #3 of 10
7/2/10 at 12:49am
Thread Starter 
it is an upgrade from vista. should be ok on ram, have 4gb and am not running anything crazy. system manager shows the ram is ok.
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post #4 of 10
7/2/10 at 12:50am
I think you've got some of those nasty little applications running in the background. I don't even know what they're called (Mac head, here).
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post #5 of 10
7/2/10 at 1:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dakota rube View Post
I think you've got some of those nasty little applications running in the background. I don't even know what they're called (Mac head, here).

Malware or Spyware usually.

Clean install of W7 on either of the drives should help you to pinpoint if the issue is W7, Hardware, or some kind of malware.
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post #6 of 10
7/2/10 at 2:05pm
Thread Starter 
highly, highly doubt it is a security issue (in a former life i did security stuff and even now i'm still decently locked down). seems like i'm just left to go with a clean install though. ah well. at least i have a new backup drive.
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post #7 of 10
7/2/10 at 5:41pm
Were you sure the noise coming from a hard drive or could it be a fan? If the laptop gets hot it will blast the internal fan which can get pretty noisy. If you sure it's the hard drive, the activity could be caused by Windows search doing some indexing, Windows Update downloading updates in the background or similar. You can try downloading Process Explorer to help you try to pin-point what it is. Defragmenting also helps to minimize read-write activity if that's the source of the noise. If all else fails you can upgrade to a SSD drive which are much quieter though they get expensive.
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post #8 of 10
7/2/10 at 7:42pm
It sounds like it's your fan. It is turning on because your computer is processing a big or a lot of task(s).
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post #9 of 10
7/5/10 at 2:55am
Thread Starter 
it's one of the rear fans. i did a clean windows install and was still eharing some noise. investigated a bit closer and can hear a bit on the back fan. oh well...at least i have more storage and a clean install now, running beautifully now have to take care of that fan. i've never heard a laptop fan get that loud (particularly since this machine is usually silenet) and it sounds just like an hdd about to die.
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post #10 of 10
7/5/10 at 4:04am
Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnGalt View Post
i've never heard a laptop fan get that loud (particularly since this machine is usually silenet) and it sounds just like an hdd about to die.

They sound like that when the bearings dry out. You'll want to get that replaced asap to insure nothing overheats. I lost a laptop that way once. The fan assembly itself shouldn't cost more than $20 and, depending on the manufacturer, you should be able to get detailed assembly/disassembly instructions for free.
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