Horrible home computer problems. Help!

As mentioned upthread, you should also take a look for cables or other obstructions that might be making contact with your fan blades. That would explain the loud noise and the (possible) thermal issues. If you aren’t comfortable using the BIOS to examine temperature levels there are several Windows utilities which can do it for you.

You might want to defrag your hard drive as well. When you delete files and install new ones, gaps are left in the old file locations that still clog up your space. Defragging reorganizes all those empty sectors and removes clutter from your computer’s processor.

How to Defragment a Hard Drive in Windows Vista

Alright.

Opened up the case. Found the remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

Seriously though, there was nowhere near as much dust inside as I expected.

Sprayed and vacuumed the dust there was out.

Kept the side panel off and rebooted.

There is a fan inside I didn’t know about.

Loud "whirling’ sound is no longer heard. Pity. Now I don’t know if it was this internal fan or the hard-drive making it.

Computer runs better now.

But…not perfect. Still a bit slow and “herky jerky”. Ran a defrag. Still not right.

This is a noticeable improvement, but something till isn’t right. False dichotomy I guess. More than one thing wrong?

Sounds like your PSU is dying.
Toms Hardware

It was not your hard drive, its a fan.

Look at the power supply fan ports (the one on the big box at the back that the power cable connects to). IME, you usually end up with two or three times as much dust built up in those as you do on case fans.

I also didn’t see any specific mention of cleaning out the CPU cooler.

In my experience, there isn’t often a lot of loose fluffy dust in and around that. What you’ll see is matted impacted dust forming a nice dense insulation layer under the fan and on top of the heat sink fins. That’s where CPU overheating will happen, if it’s happening.

From the description, I can’t tell if the computer has a separate video card, but cleaning that out is also a priority, because that’s the other major dust-collector.

Couple of weeks ago i peered inside my PC box, it seemed fairly clean, but i took the CPU fan off to check, it was basically felt fluff in there. I just put the vacuum clearer over it and used a dry paintbrush.

CCleaner has a “Startup” tab, look in there see what’s really self running. Fans going bad will often sound better if the case is moved, they soon go off again though.

Depending on when you are running your daily spyware and virus scans and updates, could it be a resource contention thing?

What does that mean?

Meaning, if,and not really sure whats specifically going on, you e running a virus scan and or a spyware scan while trying to surf… you sould see it be slow cuz the resources are being used for the virus/ spyware scan.

This happens to me when using AVG virus protection… I kil the scan

This. I learned the hard way. I had all of my family pictures and some games I really liked. I didn’t have your warnings. Just one morning, I woke up and it didn’t. I did finally, found a shop that could get the files I needed. I now have all pictures on either disc or external hard drive.
(My husband has taken the ex hard drive, twice, because he thought his crap was more important than my crap, I mean important stuff.)

You can also use cloud storage for your cra…I mean, important stuff.

If you can stand another person weighing in:

It sounds to me, too, like a thermal issue.

If I were to speculate wildly, I’d guess that the noise you were hearing was something wrong with the CPU fan (I’m also guessing that the internal fan you found was part of the CPU cooler). When you opened up the case, you may have temporarily (or if you’re lucky, permanently) gotten the fan working like it should again.

And, now that I think a little more on it…Had you moved the computer prior to it acting up? It’s possible (though in my experience not likely) that the thermal paste between the CPU and the cooler cracked/shifted and is no longer conducting heat like it should. That could cause the CPU fan to kick into high gear, trying to cool of the CPU.

I’m almost certain now that it was a heat problem.