So my computer died

[Vulcan]

Clicking could be a dust bunny shorting something as well (I have seen it). As drano said give it a good clean.

[Lazerr]

Pretty strange, went 2 days in this computer coma we will call it, went to start messing around with it last night and it worked fine.

[Drano]

Still, random clicking sounds that shouldn't be happening might tend to be a bad sign on a ten year old machine. Especially if you haven't really messed around inside the case in all that time. Like Vulcan said It could have been a dust bunny and maybe it just moved. It could have been a stuck head on the HDD that just unstuck itself. Still not a good sign. Act now before the mushroom cloud happens! SSDs are fairly cheap. Everything else suggested is free and if you watched the video on cloning the drive, not hard to do.

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[Lazerr]

Still, random clicking sounds that shouldn't be happening might tend to be a bad sign on a ten year old machine. Especially if you haven't really messed around inside the case in all that time. Like Vulcan said It could have been a dust bunny and maybe it just moved. It could have been a stuck head on the HDD that just unstuck itself. Still not a good sign. Act now before the mushroom cloud happens! SSDs are fairly cheap. Everything else suggested is free and if you watched the video on cloning the drive, not hard to do.

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Yeah still going to get a ssd.  I still can't open things like Google Chrome and other programs as it will start thinking too hard, and go back into the coma, but It will run aces high just fine.  Got a few sorties in last night while I should have been fixing the problem.   

[Drano]

Yeah that "thinking" sound you're hearing is the heads seeking on the platters. While you should hear some clicking on a mechanical hard drive, if it's getting really loud--that's bad. I have just NVME drives on this machine but put SSDs on my hoopty retro (98&XP) pc too. Quiet.

If it's just clicking away while you're basically doing nothing might want to see if there's something running in the background that's causing it too. Could be that porn site giving you a gift that keeps on giving! Start the task manager and look in the processes tab. Click on the cpu column so it sorts by the highest load programs. See anything there that you don't recognize or don't need running? Something that's got a really high percent number? Google it if you're not sure and find out what it is. If you don't want it running, right click on it and select end task. See if the crazy clicking stops. BTW, that cpu load at idle should be something like a few percent. And killing a program here might not kill it for long. It may pop right back up depending on what it is. If you haven't killed the service or stopped it at startup it'll come back at next boot.

Go to the startup tab and disable anything you don't want starting with windows.

Services are another thing. Lots of stuff there you don't need running all the time. Just taking away clock cycles from your CPU and making your hard drive and internet work for nothing. Google "black viper" . That page had guides for each version of windows which shows services you can just disable. It's like free performance. SOP for me.

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