I have a dell 8100 laptop, and I use it as a desktop replacement while I am at college so it is on almost all the time. It now makes this funny noise - a constant and very irritating noise - almost gritty. It kinda sounds like a refrigerator or something. The trick is though - if I hold down my mouse button it stops. I was trying to study and it got really annoying, so I put a weight on my mouse to shut it up. After I took the weight off the noise didn't come back for a couple days. I used to have an old gateway P.O.S. that made the same noise so this is kinda scaring me. I can't really tell where the noise is coming from but it is in the area of the fans/cpu/hardrive. It is not fan noise(even though those are dying too). Any insight on this topic would be great. Thanks.

Noises that are related to the mouse are often casued by interference in the sound card. Try turning the sound off and see if it stops. Stuart

mark, i can see why your confused. The noise you describe sounds like your harddrive's going but when you said you could alter the noise by applying pressure i was leaning towards a cable touching a fan. But since you say holding your mouse button down will stop the noise that eliminates the cable on the fan scenario. The noise has to be 1) a fan, 2) the harddrive, or 3) a removable storage device (floppy, cd, dvd) since they're the only moving parts. First i'd yank the power to the harddrive and boot from floppy or CD to see if the noise goes away. If not your harddrive's fine. It's fairly difficult to get at components in most laptops so if you've never done it before don't attempt it yourself, but if you are comfortable or know of someone that is my next step would be to yank the power to the removable storage devices and see if that solves the noise isssue. If not i'd see if there's anything floating around the cpu fan, vid card fan (if there is one), or if something's gotten into your power supply fan. Even if there's nothing in or touching the fans it could be the fan bearings that are making the noise so you can try yanking the power to those as well but only run for a few seconds without the fan or you could cause major problems from the heat. Good luck. ciao, wired

I'm leaning (or at least hoping for you) toward Stuart's theory. But nice job Wired, very thorough and concise. Tell us how it turns out, I'm curious. -C

Thanks for all of the replies guys. I will try your suggestions, and hopefully it is nothing major. This is finals week for me, so I am pressed for time. I will post how it goes. Upon further placement of my ear all over the bottom of this thing it sounds to be coming from either the sound card itself - not the speakers, or the video card area. It has a new gimmick today also, it now no longer reacts to my mouse click to shut it up, but it stops for the short period of time that a webpage or file is loading. I don't know if that means anything or not, but I will let you know what I find - if anything. Thanks Mark