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What's that noise?

The average personal computer has so many moving parts that it can make quite a racket when you turn it on.

The power supply, central processing unit and motherboard are cooled by small fans which keep the internal workings of the machine from overheating. Then there's the hard disk drive and the optical drive which have their own hum as the system starts up.

You quickly become attuned to the background noise, and filter it out, but will soon notice when things aren't right. Any deviation from the norm could mean a potential failure, from your computer needing a new component such as a cooling fan, hard disk drive, or optical disk drive, to need to replace the whole machine.

Grinding noise

The grinding or clicking of a cooling fan usually means it is about to give out. If such a thing happens it should be immediately replaced, for a relatively modest cost, by your preferred computer technician. Leaving it could be a very costly exercise, particularly if it's the power supply’s fan.

This is located at the top of your computer’s console at the back, which has failed. If it stops it could mean a power supply failure. A power supply with no cooling fan will overheat and if it does it will then need replacing.

A power supply failure can cause power spikes, damaging other components in your machine such as the central processing unit, memory (RAM) and even the mother board. If this happens you could be looking at some costly replacements and repairs.

Noisy hard disk?

Noise coming from your hard disk drive, which revolves at phenomenal speeds, can often mean the drive is about to fail. You may have minutes, hours, days, weeks or months to back up your data before the drive falls over and you lose everything stored on your machine.

You can copy important files to an external hard disk drive before your machine fails, and Windows 7 has a very good Backup and Recovery Centre within the Control Panel which automatically backs data up at pre-set intervals.

When it comes to funny noises an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure.