Just a week or so ago, I posted about problems I was having with a chirping noise coming from my tower. I kept having disk boot failures several times a day. So, on the advice of several people, I went out and bought a new hard drive so that I could clone it before it crashed. In doing so, I opened up the computer for the first time since I purchased it in Nov. 2003. Boy did it have a lot of dust bunnies inside! And, I have 5 cats, so I'm certain that helped contribute to the dust. I cleaned out as much of the dust as I could (only learning
after I had vaccumed that I should not do that). I noticed a diamond-shaped piece (that looks like several fingers sticking up) was not attached on one side. It was stuck to the motherboard. I pushed the piece back into the little hole where it belonged and finally, it stuck. I would send a digital picture of it, but I have never been able to attach anything in this forum. I don't know what the problem is. I can successfully attach pictures, documents, etc. everywhere else. Anyway, once I installed the new hard drive, the computer has not had a single disk boot failure, nor any squeaking chirping sounds coming from it. It's run wonderfully, so I don't know what the chirping was, but I'll trust the people who told me it was my hard drive. Why isn't it making any sounds any more? Not that I want it to fail, but this is strange. I'm wondering if the cleaning might have improved things quite a bit?
The piece that was loose looks like this \ \ \ \ \ \
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I really have no idea what its function is. Could anyone tell me? Sorry this is so vague. The piece is about 1 1/2 inches tall and about 2 inches square.
Also, how can I find out how hot my hard drive can run? Right now, HD Tune says that it is running at 53 degrees C. And, it's only 68F degrees in this room. In summer, it is much much hotter in this room. There is no AC in this room, and I live in Tempe, AZ where the high temps get up to 118F some days. It has gotten as hot as 90F in this room many days. Now, I have two hard drives, and I'm thinking it's going to be even hotter inside.