Dell Vostro 1310 noise

I just got my Dell Vostro 1310 yesterday, my first laptop ever. Upon using it, I noticed this recurring clicking noise, coming out from the right side of the machine. I think that would be the harddrive. It doesn't go on always, but it does very often, and it happens at a rate of one click every 1-2 seconds, and already it's driving me mad.

So is this a common problem? A fixable one? What can one do? Does it, well... go away eventually? I just started law school and I already have enough crap on my plate to deal with.

 

... nobody?

 

No need to bump, everyone should get equal chances to have their questions listed. To answer your problem, it is probably your hard drive parking the head to save power and to help with data loss if you drop it. You can stop the clicking by using Dell's Notebook Hardware Control, which is a software version of controlling the hard drive parameters. Perhaps if you can give the make of your hard drive, a program can be identified to set it at the hardware level without the use of this program.

To fix the issue with the sound, after installation of the program, you must go to the Settings Tab, and click the line that says "Show all NHC options and settings". Then you can select the Hard Drive Tab. Change the Advanced Power Management number from default of Without Spin Down (128) to something higher, say 254.
For Acoustic Management, you can change the numbers to reflect sound vs. performance. Louder sounds give more performance, and vice versa.

You can download the Notebook Hardware Control here:
http://www.p35-forum.de/files/nhc_2.0_pre_release_06_dell.zip

Note you must have .NET framework 2.0 installed to be able to run the program.

 

Well, it's a "250GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive"; when I check its properties it says, "WDC WD2500BEVS-75UST0".

 

Never owned a WD brand notebook hard drive to know how noisy they are,but have had a couple of very noisy Toshiba's.

Just follow enducts advice with notebook hardware control [great app] and set the acoustic management to quiet [128] and advanced power management to max performance,and see how it is.

 

Western Digital can use Hitachi's Tool. Make sure you have a blank CD handy, and burn the image below from Hitachi's site. Boot from the CD (press F12 before Dell BIOS boot screen is over to select boot from CD). Setting the value should be self explanatory once it is loaded. This will adjust acoustics on a hardware level, meaning no need to control it from a program inside Windows every time it starts up. Adjust values as to the above post, there are the same options there.

Link:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/ftool_211.iso