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Originally Posted by uly
It's pretty hard to describe. I've had harddrive failures before (several years ago). It wasn't quite the click of death, but it sounded like the initial click you get when inserting a floppy -- only more accute.
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So the click of death is not a hard drive failure? What is it? I'm guessing probably an electrical failure of a motherboard component? If you lose a capacitor or resistor completely and instantly (which is basically a rapid conversion from solid to gas) it will make a loud pop. As we used to say in the Navy, that lets the magic smoke out. (The magic smoke being what makes electronics work. Once it gets out, they're dead.)
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Originally Posted by uly
The "click" I got last night was actually not that clicky at all. It sounded like a raving engine's vroom but without the pops, so I suspect it could be the fan as well. It was loud enough to wake me, though, and it changed pitched halfway. So, like I said, it's hard to describe.
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Yeah, if it's something that sounds like it could be linked to a object in rotation it's probably a fan, especially if it happened when the computer was not in use. The hard drive shouldn't really be spinning much (if at all) when the computer's idle. Not to mention I would think that if the hard drive were making sounds like that it would be long dead. The bearings in a fan can make a wide range of frightening noises.
Typically, whenever I have a desktop that starts making "bad" fan noises I just pull fans one by one until I find the bad one and replace it. I used to wait until failure, but that turned out to be much too expensive.
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Originally Posted by uly
I tried to open up the notebook but without success so far; didn't want to do anything rough. Is there some kind of guide out there for notebook disections?
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If you look hard enough you can probably find a service guide online. Dell actually has theirs available. Just go to the service area of their website, put in your laptop model, and look in "User Guides and Manuals". It's infinitely more useful than their tech support.