A8jm noise AGAIN, need help

I got my A8jm in Feb 2007, I absolutely love this laptop ***when it works***. It's really powerful, fast, and quiet. However, starting in Dec 2007, there were some weird clicking noise (ie: like the sound you hear when you just put a CD/DVD into the drive and it starts to read; it was weird in a sense that I didn't put the CD/DVD into the drive, and only one or two clicks came up). After a month or so I started noticing there was a detached part when I tilted/rotated the laptop at different angles, though the laptop worked perfectly fine. Also another strange sound came up as if the detached part was caught in spinning fan. I treated my laptop with really good care, though I needed to bring it to school everyday and I didn't think it's the best for a laptop like this in retrospect.

My laptop died in Feb 2008 (there was an electric shock, then the signals on the screen went crazy, I pressed the power button to turn off, and it never came back on), fortunately, my 1-year warranty was still valid, so I sent in my laptop to Asus, and they did fixed everything (including the HD etc). Since then, the laptop worked perfectly fine like brand new. And I mostly treated it as a desktop with ulmost care (ie: it mainly sits on my working desk, and I have used a external coolers, etc).

Though, a few days ago, I started to hear the same weird clicking noises again (about once/twice in half an hour; and I suspected the sound came from the right side of the laptop), and I am afraid it will go down the same path as the last incident, which will be very distressing. I am not sure if I am considered a heavy user, the laptop is on, I would say, 7-9 hours on a daily basis and almost never left the power on overnight. It's mainly used for reading doc, typing, watching movies, and browsing (though I usually play 2-3hr command and conquer 3 once or twice a week). I sometimes put my hands near the fan and it was cold most of the time, except after playing CnC3. The CPU system idle process is 90+% most of the time.

A funny thing I have noticed about my CPU speed is that although it is supposed to be 1.83GHz, when I run the "system requirement lab" @ http://www.systemrequirementslab.com, it reads my CPU speed as "You Have: 1.83 GHz Performance Rated at 3.43 GHz". I wonder if my laptop is accidentally over-clocked? And if this is the reason why the computer is worn out quickly? What other reasons might be the cause and what should I do? And should I be worrying at all?

Any input will be much appreciated!

 

I doubt your laptop has been accidently overclocked. Most likely the rating is a comparison using a single core CPU as a baseline. If the CPU had indeed been overclocked to that level, you would see heat issues.

Are you sure the clicking sounds isn't just your hard drive parking it's head?

 

What does hard drive parking normally sound like? As far as I could remember though, I didn't hear any mechanical noise from the laptop except when I put CD/DVD and the laptop start to load.

Also, is there a way to test my current clock speed and laptop temperature? Just in case.

 

I have used RMclock program to examine my CPU speed and it does say it's performing at about 1GHz, and the core temp is arond 25C without the external cooler (22C with cooler; 39C while gaming). I wonder if other Asus users, esp the A8 series, notice the noise/sound I have mentioned, is it normal?

I asked my roomate who uses a HP laptop and he said he doesn't hear anything similar.

 

Maybe you can google to find some sound files about HDD ticking/clicking, to compare your sound to. Do the sounds come from the area of the laptop where the HDD is located?