Tick tock! PSU? HDD? Fan? crunch!

EEK!

Scenario.

Been away for couple of weeks, get back home late last night.

Turned on computer for a little bit and all seemed fine.

Had it on for a couple of hours today and seemed to be ok. Left it on while i've been doing "stuff".

However..... just a few MOments ago a nasty clicky noise came from the tower! Starts sounding a bit crunchy then slows to a MOre tick-tock sorta of a click. Cursor MOves in response to the MOuse MOvements, but unable to click anything or type.

The usual background noise from the tower (fan? hard drive? psu?) seems to stop. Press the power button to turn off to restart (have to hold a push button <<not switch>> down for 10 seconds on my computer to turn it off). and as soon as touch it, it seems to come alive again.

It's done this a few times in the last half hour or so. Once during start up, which caused an error message mentioning possible causes such as a power failure during start up.

And also it caused a restart once.

Is it terminal?

Also, i've not long installed XP Pro on here. It seems to be running fine and I wouldn't imagine it's anything to do with that? Sounds MOre hardware than software to me.

Any help or advice muchio appreciated as always!

MO

 

It could be the hard drive sticking Mo
that would cause the lack of response from the keyboard and mouse.

Robert

 

If it was your hard drive it would probably not restart your system, if you CPU fan has failed it would probably have metled by now, to me it sounds like a power supply failure but I may be wrong. A good 400W ATX power supply only costs £30 though and they are very easy to replace.

 

could be a simple dodgy switch.

 

seems to have been fine since I posted this thread!

Perhaps the vary mention of replacement power supplies was enough to scare this one to sort its act out!

I've tried opening a few *hungry* programs at once to see if I can cause the problem MOself but no result.

Things seem ok for now. But, it didn't sound healthy at all!

It's like Fort Knox trying to get inside my pc, but i'll probably have a look later.