When getting up during the night, and when all is still, I can hear my PC laptop making a noise as if it were working hard at something. I first thought it was the disc drive spinning, but that is not it. When I shut it down, the noise stops.
The one night I did shut it down at the end of the evening - as opposed to letting it go to sleep - it did not make the noise.
I guess I should start looking in task manager for programs that may be running, but I need some help as to what, specifically, I should look for.
No software changes have been made recently.
Any thoughts?
mmm
ETA: Maybe it’s the fan? How would I rule that out?
Simpler trick: make a stethoscope. A rolled up sheet of paper will do. When the noise occurs, use the stethoscope to determine what part of the PC is making the noise. If it is next to a vent, and it’s a laptop, it’s probably the fan.
If it’s a desktop, it’s easier to take the side off, so that you can listen to the fan directly. With a desktop, it’s even easier, with the side off and the noise occurring, to stop each fan and listen for the noise to stop.
Other noise sources: if you left a disk in the optical drive, and the PC decides to spin it up as it cycles itself up and down over time, and the disk isn’t perfectly balanced, the disk will vibrate and make noise.
if you have one of the All-In-One machines, it’s tougher to take it apart and leave it running for tests, so again use the stethoscope.
Some machines also have diagnostics built in that you can run. Locate them during initial startup, usually using f12, but watch for pre-boot messages with hints.
The fan option could be related to CPU intensive scheduled tasks. There’s a potential that dust in the fan, ports, heatsink fins, etc. are effecting cooling if it’s not relatively new. That could mean new noise (not just noise you hadn’t heard before) as the fan spins up higher to try and counter balance. Comfortable cracking open the bottom to check for dust and possibly clean?
For looking up running tasks look for ones that are CPU or disk intensive. Under Win10 you can sort by both of those in task manager. I don’t recall enough to comment on Win7 and I skipped the 8s. If something is taking a lot of resources, and it’s got an inscrutable name you don’t recognize, dump the process name in your favorite search engine. In some cases you’ll know the program but not why and it’s not apparently running a scheduled task in it’s setting. I just start searching for stuff like “DumbProg CPU intensive”
