MacBook Pro troubleshooting questions

I've got a few questions about my MBP, purchased in late 2008. I'm trying to get it to last until the end of the year so I can use my Christmas bonus to buy a new machine, instead of taking money out of my paychecks. But it's doing two things that concern me, and I want to know what, if anything, they mean.

(1) Disc permissions.

On my Powerbook G4, I'd verify and repair disc permissions every few months or more. There'd never be more than a few that were wrong. Hell, I hadn't done that in over a year on the Powerbook (which I still own and which still runs well), and I did it tonight, and there was only one permission that needed repair.

On the MacBook Pro, I repaired them just a few days ago, and I ran it again, and got this:

That's a lot in just a few days, and the last line sounds ominous. But I have no idea what this means. Is my hard drive failing? Do I have a malware problem? Is some other hardware on the machine failing (my mother's MacBook Pro recently had a motherboard failure, so now I'm all paranoid about that)? Or is this just typical and nothing to worry about?

(2) Ticking noise on startup

When the machine has been sleeping or shut down for a while, and I start it back up, for about ten minutes, I hear some noise that sounds almost like a faulty-and-loose bicycle chain. Once the machine has warmed up, the sound goes away. Is this most likely just a noisy cooling fan? Or a hard drive having issues? Or something else entirely?

Thanks in advance!

 

Upon seeing how inexpensive replacement hard drives are, I thought I'd swap it out as a better-safe-than-sorry measure. Got this Hitachi 500GB 7200rpm HDD for $60 because of the positive user reviews:

Amazon.com: Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 Inch 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA II 16 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02858: Electronics

 

Did it fix the issue?

 

HDD is scheduled to arrive in the mail on or before August 1st (I chose cheap, slow shipping). I'll guess we know then. I'm hoping it solves both issues? We'll see.