I have a HP Pavilion 750n desktop with a Pentium 4 processor. My PSU fan is making an annoying buzzing sound. It's really loud when I first turn on the system (it sounds like a food processor), but dies down after a few minutes, but after that, it's intermittent but getting more frequent. I checked the system temp with PC Wizard and it said that my computer temperature is 38ºC (100ºF). I'm on my third PSU on this computer and the current one is less than a year old. I'm really getting frustrated at having to invest so much money into this old desktop (new sound card and all those PSUs in the last year). Everyone says I should just get a new tower, but with the new Windows 7, I am concerned that my old software won't work on it (like MS Office 2000). There was a power outage a few weeks ago. After the electrical outage, I started to notice this noise. The outage also disabled my sound card. I wanted to know if this sound is anything to be concerned about, if the outage could have affected the PSU, and if the temperature is normal. Thank you.
Hello debodun,
Sorry to hear that you're having problems.
38ºC is okay and within normal temperature tolerances. You only need to start worrying if it gets up to 70ºC or 80ºC.
Temperatures do, however, vary in different parts of the computer. What you were probably looking at is the CPU temperature, but if you could let me know what section it was under we can find out for sure.
As for the sound of the fan, are you sure it's the PSU fan? If there are other case fans, and if you have a GPU, it's worth checking those out too. Just turn the computer off, unplug it from the wall and have a look inside. Check for any dust or loose cables and see if any of the fans are stiff. If you're comfortable with it, you can try running the PC with the side off. This will let you pin down exactly where the grinding sound is coming from.
If it turns out that the sound is coming from the PSU, there isn't much you can do but to replace it. And if you're right and a power surge has damaged other components, you may have to replace those too.
Once we can figure out where the sound is coming from, we'll see what we can do about the sound card.
Cheers,
