AboutMike Expertise Areas of expertise: PC Hardware, Peripherals, Barcode Scanners, Printers, and Applications, Basic Networking, Microsoft Applications. I am good at researching issues and have a lot of contacts. So if I can't directly answer a question I can likely find the answer.
Areas I won't be much help in: Apple Computers, Linux, older Networking topologies like Token Ring.
Experience I'm currently an IT Support Technician for a contract circuit
board manufacturer in Oregon, USA. I've been working on PCs from a hobby standpoint for better than 25 years. I've been doing it professionally for 3 years.
Expert: Mike Date: 7/5/2008 Subject: Too much noise
Question Hi.
I have a simple or dumb question.
I have a DELL Optiplex GX260, Pentium 4 with Windows XP Professional. My computer works well , I don't have major problems. Lately I've observed that anytime I am watching an online video, such as movie or live streaming it makes a lot of noise, quite loud since my computer is apparently quite. It feels as if my hard drive or fan is spinning without stop. It makes me wonder why this is happening, if some hardware is going bad or if it's normal. As I said in the beginning it may be a dumb question and eve if it is, I'd like to know if you have an answer.
Thanks a lot.
Sonia
Answer Not a dumb question, or really a simple one frankly. Lack or computer performance like that can be caused by a lot of different possibilities so it's not simple.
Excess hard drive spinning like that is called 'thrashing' and it can be caused by either a need for more ram or perhaps your drive just needs some basic maintenance.
You can check how much memory you have by right-clicking My Computer and going to Properties. When it comes to memory, the more the better, but I'd say you should have a minimum of 512MB. If you have less than that then you should consider buying more.
As far as the basic maintenance goes, you should perform both a Disk Cleanup and a Disk Defragmenter just to clear out any built up temporary files and re-organize the drive. You get to these by going to Start, then All Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools.
When you open Disk Defragmenter you'll see your drive information displayed in 3 different colors, Green for system files that can't be moved, and Blue and Red for your programs, files, and such that can get scrambled as time goes by. Red is bad, red meand those are files that are fragmented. So, run Disk Defragmenter over and over until all you see is Blue and the chunk of Green.
There are more complicated things that can be causing your problem, like a need for driver updates, or you might need a better video card, or several others.
However, I'd just try the steps above and see if the help. Then if not you can drop me another note and we can get into more complicated ideas.
