Barefoot Andrew
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A noise!Hmm, this machine has been making an intermittent 'noise' lately - could be fan, could be disk. Needless to say if it's the latter I'll be straight onto Dell with the word "warranty" on my lips...
Anyway, to investigate further I thought I'd run the machine with the side of the case off this week. But no, not quite as simple as the old days. The BIOS popped up up a message saying "Alert! System thermal solution compromised. Replace case and reboot". Meanwhile, the machine's fans - normally very quiet - spun up to a ferocious turbo mode. So that was the end of that line of investigation... 
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earthyvirgo
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I find that my Dell laptop goes into overdrive on a regular basis ... loads of disk activity if I run more than Photoshop and a browser and gets pretty hot, and slow.
Having said that, it is a few years old and probably needs a through sort out and de-frag.
You've had yours ... less than a year haven't you?
When you had the side off, did you actually look inside to see if it was 'dusty'. Had an experience years ago when we worked at home with computers on the floor, that they got very hot because they were scarily clogged up inside. A quick (careful) hoover did the job!
EV
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Barefoot Andrew
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Had this machine since August, but bad luck with premature disk death isn't impossible.
I might contact Dell to suss out the procedure for dealing with this just as a preemptive measure. If they were going to take ages messing about I'd need to buy a disk and stick it in, can't be without the machine...
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Treacodactyl
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I assume you've backed up everything already. Do any of the manufacturer disk utilities self-diagnose disk drives these days? I thought some of the new breed disks have a fair bit of info about themselves.
If you do have a problem it's worth asking for a replacement drive and to keep the old one as you're concerned about your data security.
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Barefoot Andrew
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Backups - oh yes.
I use Vista's built-in backup facilities - rather good IMHO. Files backup runs every day at 9pm; whole machine backup run periodically by me, last done about 2 weeks ago.
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