barely audible clicking from hard drive...and other questions

Hello,

I have a lengthy story, so please bear with me.

Back in December, thanks to you guys and the BTOTech video, I repasted my ASUS G73JH-A1 with AS5 and was getting great temps--low-mid 40s idling; Furmark took it up to 77 and stayed around there if I remember correctly.

Fast forward to two weeks ago...

It was a Saturday morning, and I decide I wanted to play Dawn of War II (it uses Steam). I now remember that sometime before this I had turned on the bass boost. So, Steam froze, and I had to hard shutdown my laptop. Then, I rebooted, (I didn't know about the Creative audio driver problem), tried it again, and the same thing happened. Then, I hard shutdown/rebooted again, but this time, the Windows welcome loading screen stayed up for a few minutes or so and finally went to the desktop with an error that said my desktop folder/file (I forget) could not be read. There was a black background, and a few basic shortcuts--none of my other ones. I'm getting kind of nervous now, so I shut the computer down again, and leave it. I boot it up awhile later, and it's fine, except the temps are now around 66deg C while idling/with Firefox running. I think they had been slowly rising before this, but now I realized it because of the whirring fans. Anyways, fast forward one week....

It was another Saturday morning. I boot up my laptop, and the same error with the desktop happens. I try to open windows explorer, and that crashes. I then try to open up the resource monitor, and then the computer freezes. I'm beginning to think that there's maybe some kind of virus or something. I hard shutdown, and reboot. Now, when I boot up, only some of my shortcuts show up, and some don't. Also, I'm in the Windows Basic theme. It almost feels as if I'm halfway between my normal desktop and the basic one produced by the error described above. Anyways, resource monitor freezes up again, so I have to do another hard shutdown. Finally, I boot up again, and everything is normal, except temps are still in mid 60s idling (they had been like this since a week ago, I started noticing after that first error).

So, I'm kind of worried, and I decide to restore from the Windows recovery partition. I zip up my personal documents, restore my laptop, and then install the programs I need and unzip the documents. However, temps are unchanged (I was thinking the temps were a software problem).

A few days later and still no change in temps. When using Skype or something, the temperature would reach upper 70s, even 80s.

Then, randomly, I'm looking at resource monitor to see if something is hogging the CPU. Suddenly, all of the data for read/writes to the HD goes blank, HD activity is 0 B/s for reading and writing, and then the computer freezes a few seconds later. I have to hard shutdown again.

Then, yesterday, I update all the drivers (keyboard, GPU, BIOS 213, I also updated the audio drivers; I have NOT updated vBIOS though). Temps greatly improved; now I'm idling in mid 50s, 55deg C currently with Firefox running. When I booted up I was staying around 43-44 deg C idling.

Also, today, I put my ear to the underside of the laptop and could hear barely audible clicking noises from one of the hard drives (the primary one with Windows 7, I think).

So, to my questions:

Do you think that just updating all of those drivers would improve the temps so much?

Could all of those hard shutdowns (10+) have caused any damage?

Are the clicking noises normal? I mean they are barely audible, I can only hear them if I put my ear to the access panel on the underside of the laptop.

Is the weird issue with the resource monitor I had a few days ago anything I should be concerned about?

I'm also going to the store today to pick up some compressed air to blow out my fans with and see if that improves temps.

Wow...that was long for a first post.

 

LOL Sounds like your ambient temps and dust buildup have got your temps higher. Perhaps you measured it on power saver and are now running it on high performance? A 10 degree boost in temps would be pretty easy to get if you had both dust buildup and a temp increase.

 

Thanks for the reply! I don't think I was on power saver, but it's possible. Is the hard drive clicking something to be worried about?

 

HDD clicking was an issue fixed with the Seagates and a firmware update.

 

I do have the Seagate Momentus drives. Where would I get the firmware update?

I also saw a video that played the beeping of the Seagate drives installed on Macbooks. There is no beeping on my laptop--only the tiny clicking that I can only hear if I put my ear to the case. Am I making an issue out of nothing?

 

as i checked its not yet available ...

 

Which specific drive? Part numbers plz

 

ST9500420AS Momentus 7200.4, I think