weird beeping

i bought a vostro 1500 last december and it works just fine. however, every now and then, the notebook will beep. i have no idea what this means.

it's a single, short beep, followed by a slight click. it comes from within the machine, not from the speakers.

there isn't any pattern that i can discern. it isn't because the battery is low. it doesn't happen every time i use my computer. there doesn't appear to be any particular application that's associated with the beeping. no dialogue box pops up; no error message flashes. the computer runs just fine.

does anyone else experience this?

here is my setup:

15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA LCD Display
2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz, 2 DIMM
128MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS
120GB 5400RPM Hard Drive
Custom Hard Drive Partition, 60GB Primary, Remainder Secondary
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem
8X CD/DVD Burner w/ double-layer DVD+R write capability, w/ Roxio Creator
High Definition Audio 2.0
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Wi-Fi Mini Card
56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor

 

That's happened to me twice, but I'm not sure about the click part.

 

This is likely the hard drive. When the head (think of a record player) moves and 'docks' when it goes to sleep or awakens, it can make goofy noises that sound like beeping and clicking. It's completely normal unless the clicking happens a lot (within a few seconds) and is accompanied by errors (google head crash).

Laptop hard drives do this a lot since they often enter and leave sleep mode to save power. You can do a quick test to confirm this: If you removed your hard drive and booted linux from CD, you shouldn't hear the clicking/beeping.