Recommend video editor and hard drive

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

Pt 1:
I just got my big Zalman cpu cooler installed, and it really helps with the noise. Now all I can hear is the power supply. But now that it’s so much quieter, I have a new noise annoyance. Every minute or so, there’s a scraping noise, like someone is sawing metal in the next apartment. It’s faint enough to be basically impossible to pinpoint. I suppose I could disconnect HDs until the noise stops (or if it doesn’t, it’s the Windows drive).

Is this scraping noise unavoidable? Because of the irregularity, it’s actually more annoying than the constant fan noise was. Are there silent HDs, or any other things that might help eliminate this?
Pt 2:
What would be a good low-level consumer video editor? I’d just like to be able to chop out clips and save them as their own files, and shift audio that’s out of sync. I looked through Quicktime’s promo page, but what it doesn’t say is if it can handle Xvid video. I assume it can audio shift, but of course it doesn’t mention that either.

#2

I don’t know about shifting audio, but VirtualDubMod can cut out clips like you asked. You may need to get it anyways, as I hear a lot of video editors don’t like imported XviD files, so you’d have to change formats. I use it solely for prepping video, so I have no idea what audio functions it has.

#3

Wow. I wondered how it could be so much harder to hear the scraping noise when kneeling to hear the computer. It’s the Compaq crt monitor that’s “scraping”. Anyone got any kind of insight on that?

#4

For the editing, I use a tool called VideoReDo.

It’s designed to do one thing really well: edit recorded TV programs.
It allows you to very easily scan for commercials and quite precisely snip them out. It also provides fairly painless “fixing” of streams.

If that’s what you want to do, try it out. It was well worth the price when I realized how many dozens and dozens of programs I was recording with my Windows MCE machine.