Well, so far, so good.
We opened up my computer and cleaned out the dust – there wasn’t all that much, really – and checked the fans, since it seemed to me that that was where the noise might have been coming from. They were fine.
Since I had to do a hard shut down, it took forever to reboot, but now that it has, everything is working as it was before. Slowly.
I need to clear more stuff out of my machine.
Still no idea why the computer wouldn’t shut down properly. Best guess is that it didn’t like the clean up and maintenance I did last night, and hiccupped.
On the plus side, half of the table I’m using as a desk is now much cleaner and organized!
Also, most of the “dust” was cat fur. Go figure.
It’s still -12C/10F out there, with a wind chill of -21C/-6F. I will have to go into town and pick up more cat food. We have enough for today, but not for tomorrow – and I’m going into the city the day after tomorrow for the big shop. Maybe I’ll just go to the local general store/post office, instead, and see what they have in stock. It’ll be more expensive, but worth not having to drive to town for it.
Then I need to dig around in my computer some more, and see what I can clear out. I’m sure there’s software I don’t use anymore that I can uninstall, too.
Gotta baby this elderly thing!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 
I hate to have computer issues.
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Before a computer was a “thing”, it was a person with that job title.
I, too, hate computer problems.
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The noise is the only thing that has me scratching my head.
As far as the drive goes, I’d recommend Crystal Disk Info. It’s free software that checks the health of hard drives:
http://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
Don’t let the two optional anime themed versions fool you. It’s reliable, and will tell you all manner of info on the drive, including general health.
In terms of free space, you may already know this, but keeping 25% of the disk free for the swapfile and other disk management programs in the background is considered optimal. That drives me nuts with a 5TB HDD, but I’ve never had any luck cheating that rule beyond 20% free space. After that, Windows starts doing what it wants and there’s all manner of performance isues.
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I had just gotten it to that 25% the night before it died!
And yeah, that repetitive noise. I honestly thought it was coming from a fan.
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FWIW, a HDD crashing sounds similar to a fan, but a bit slower and with more of a grind to it.
If you have to replace the drive, I’d recommend WD Black series. I trust them over Seagate or Toshiba.
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