strange noises coming from my computer..

[lastsamurai]

I am getting these strange grinding noises coming out of my dell i bought about 1 year ago. They usually start when i am online for a few hours playing a CD rom game age of the empires... Can anybody help me?

LAST.

[Terry]

I’d guess it’s your hard drive grinding, probably when it’s using virtual memory. If you don’t have 1MB of RAM, adding some would help a lot.

Also, defrag your drive so the heads don’t have to jump all over the disk ... and turn off all the background stuff that’s running; virus checker, etc. – those things use up your RAM, forcing the game to use virtual memory.

It could also be a bad fan, which is a more serious issue. Pop open your case while it's making the noises and see if you can figure out exactly where it's coming from... that's the only way of really knowing.

[FouTight]

I agree with the fan here, could be that when the computer heats up, the fan spins faster, it may just be noisy and not actually a problem.

Also make sure all cables are clear of the fans. A friend of mine was having a problem with noise, turned out there was a cable on the fan.

Heh, yeah, ran into that problem a couple days ago.