im not sure if i should be upset, worried or happy about this but for some reason over the past few days i have noticed that my computer hasnt been going mental with the cpu fan which makes a god aweful amount of noise :scratchin

its not just when im logged into the computer and playing games or what ever either, usually when i turn the computer on, there is a period of about 10 seconds where the fans spin like crazy which creates a really loud and annoying sound, lately that hasnt happened i dunno what the go is, but even during winter when it was literally 5 degrees, when i turned the computer on, the fans would come on like crazy...

now all i can hear is a backgrund whirring noise from the fan like its barely running....i checked in my bios to see if anything had been changed and didnt see anything but restored the settings without any changess occurring

almost forgot to mention that im running windows xp with sp2 (with all current updates), 2.8GHz, 384MB memory, 60GB HDD, etc. nothing special by any means but its not old and still a pretty decent computer, its just gone quiet and has me worried also, i have run scan disks, defrags, registry scanners, anti-virus, ad-aware, etc. and came up with nothing except a slightly fragmented hard drive which i assume should make the cpu work a bit harder which should equal more noise from the fans :scratchin

if anyone has any idea what the problem is, im all ears and would be forever gratefull :smoke

If you're certain which fan was making the noise, check for its' operation with the case door off.
They rarely fix themselves if something goes wrong, so perhaps no noise is bad news? Maybe it's stopped altogether. You should replace it if that's the case.
On the subject of fans, have you considered keeping them clean? My mates pc was terribly slow and crashed to desktop pretty regularly. Some mutual friends, $90 / hr computer people theorised and hypothesised and tinkered and fiddled for weeks. Free, but unsuccessfully.
I turned up virtually allergic to computers and suggested lightly vacuuming the thick blanket of dust off all his fans and heat sinks, and LO, the improvement was immediate and remarkable. A few heads hung in shame that day.

ps, I had a noise I thought was a fan. Turned out to be the harddrive! Bastard. Fans are cheaps as, not so hd's.

The bearing on your fan is probably gone. Take it to your local PC guys, or if you know what you're doing just grab a new one from your local computer markets. $20 should cover it.

And as Superninja says, it's important to keep your fans, ventilation slits and heatsinks (and generally your case) free of dust. My suggestion is to take the side off and put it in your boot. Then find a service station with the old kind of compresed air hose and give it a thorough blow out. Just make sure you blow 3-5 seconds of air onto your hands first to make sure there's no moisture in it.

RS

Can't be bothered writing up a long reply to explain everything in detail, so here's a few tips/points:

- If you can feel heat radiating out more than 1cm or so from the CPU when you take your case-cover off, your fan isn't working hard enough and needs to be replaced (could've worn out).

- Dust itself makes no difference, the problem is when the dust becomes thick enough to prevent airflow, thus increasing wear and tear on your fans and general heat damage to the electronics.... makes very little difference to well-designed cases intended to prevent the problem (ever notice PC's don't use air-filters?).

- The cooler metal is the faster electrons can flow along it (better conduction), hot metal causes crashes/freezes becuase electrictity isn't getting through.

- If you only not this problem due to the "sound" of your fan, and not other symptoms (i.e. crashing/freezing when it didn't used to, slow performance) you probably have nothing to worry about.

- Your Hard-Drive being Fragmented or not has no noticable impact on your CPU, Data-IO is done on the mainboard via DMA (generally, some architectures vary).

i dont think computers were designed to be left on for like 6 months i formatted the computer today, left it off for 30 mins, turned it back on and the fans worked like a charm :thumbsup

weirdly enough, i left it on for an hour, rebooted and the fans didnt work as they should, so i left it off for another hour and they worked again

goddamn i hate computers but cant live without one, life just aint fair

Hey Wantda, i had the same hassell with my vga fan died and then a week latter the cpu fan died, thay do get ratteley when thay are just about give up, the sleeve bearing in them wears out pretty quick, you can get some nice fans from ebay for ya cpu just comes down on how much ya want to spend, u can get a water cooled set up for ya cpu but the idear of water inside my system dont sound to good...