wierd ticking/clicking noise

Ok my asus z70va has been running real slow latley and i suspected it might be the hard drive however i ran hard drive fitness test and it seems to be in perfect working order. Just 5 mins ago i got a weird ticking/clicking sound comming from what seemed like the left hand side of the notebook happened twice in a row lasting about 3 secs each time and a 1 min delay between occurences what the hell could this be never heard it before and had this over a year now.

 

Maybe the HDD test brought the HDD in some weird state where a hidden malfunction flared up, and now you see the effect of that malfunction?

Hopefully not. Even if so, maybe the HDD will settle back into its original state.

Verify if the HDD is in the area from where you heard the noise. If so, get a bunch of DVDs and backup your important data, first thing Starting with the most important things (work etc.)

 

well that is where the HD is located it sounded like it was comming from there. I dunno hehe maybe i should just say screw it and replace the HD to be on the safe side i mean i dont know what to attribute this ridiculous slow down and now the clicking too besides the hard drive even though the fitness test posted no probs. I had to reformat last month due to comming home and seeing my notebook on a reboot cycle just rebooting non stop after hitting the windows load screen was nothing i could do besides reformat i thought that might be the start of HD failure who knows.

 

Slowdown can come from other reasons... many reasons really. Only a few could be the following:

- upon windows installation, prior to updating Windows and lifting the firewall, you got a virus
- your HDD is very full and fragmented
- you have a lot of programs running in the background after you installed all the software
- you have some kind of conflict / improperly uninstalled hardware etc.

I'm sure you can come up with other things that might be wrong as well

Try testing for these first. Take a look at the processes list, first thing, see if anything is eating up too much CPU.

But if the HDD is acting weirdly, backup your data.

 

Check you even log also is they disk related errors ?

Cound be get to bad sector try and then makeing noise try to read that sector. I seen hard disk where people had partions they drives and one side partions was okay cause bad sectors end up be the area of disk that had sec partions so it never ready read that parts disk until he did full scan then of course it made click ticking noise

also what type of hard disk is hatich by chanced?

 

It's definitely the hard drive.

I had that happen to me, heard it maybe 4-5 times then it just stopped as suddenly as it started and I havent heard it since.

 

yes its hitachi and id does seem that alot of system resources are being used. I dunno what is eating them up. Simple programs like internet explorere will go in and out of eating up 60% of resources. But there is not one main program running in the background that i can see eating them up but latley system CPU usage hovers around 80 - 90 % alot of the time a when im doing simple things that shouldnt eat up alot of resources. For instance i just unrared a bunch of rare files and cpu usage was at 99% and it took 10 mins to unrar 1cd worth of stuff. Was at the point where my mouse would skip. Should i replace the hard drive?? Or just reformat and go fromthere??

 

Like I said, I'm not sure the slowdown is related to the HDD. The clicking is related to the HDD. There is no proof (from what I've read) that the slowdown is also related to it.

Verify for other causes, possibly starting with the suggestions I gave above.

 

Almost all hard disk will make a clicking noise, however, since some are quieter, it is more dofficult to notice. It is caused when the hard disk is working, and collecting or writing data. The arm has to switch to different positions on the platter, so a sudden movement is registered as a short click. Unless, it gets louder or begins to make a really unhealthy noise, I wouldn't consider anything wrong with the hard disk.

 

ok ive downloaded that microsoft process explorer and it seems like the process that is eating up all my sytem resources like crazy is "Interupts" described as hardware interupts. Oh and yes im familiar with the typical hard drive sounds but had this one for over and year and this was a definitive much louder rapid clicking sound. Never heard it before was much higher pitched then the regular hard drive sounds that are made.

 

It therefore seems to be that:

Check your Device Manager to verify that all devices are properly installed, and there are no conflicts.

 

only 2 devices have explamation points beside them:

The first one is under "other devices" its the Ethernet controler

The other is under "non plug and play devices" called Serial

Ethernet controller was fixed with a simple update/find drivers i dont know how to fix the other one and could either of those really cause probs??

 

Yes, they could. And they probably are.
Do you have a serial port on your laptop? If yes, do you use it? If not, disable it (either from BIOS if possible, otherwise from the Device Manager in Windows). That could solve your problem.

I don't know how to advise you further since I never had hardware conflicts, so I didn't need to solve any

 

ok i disabled infared port through device manager but the conflict thingy is still showing over "Serial" should i disable that too?