Um...help!

[sankenbisha]

Hello all! I have a HP Pavilion N3478 bought almost two years ago. For the
past few months the fan seems to make awful sounds if it's been on for more than a minute or two. I know it's not the HD making the noise as the HD makes more or a creaking sound. The fan comes on once in awhile and whirrs normally, then it sounds as if it's about to die with as it makes horrible grinding wirring noices, then it stops, but comes on at a later time. Is this serious or do I just need to replace it somehow? Can I do such a thing or is a techie dude needed?

Next question: recently, when I click on start then pick the restart option, the computer just freezes: the black screen comes up and a curser (well, a little line) appears near the top left then that's it. It doesn't continue to restart so I poke that emergency shutdown button under the notebook, then power up again after a minute. I've reinstalled the OS and software twice recently but the restart option still works only one in three tries. Why is this and how can I fix it?

Or is my notebook junk and is about to die soon? LOL!

Thank you VERY much, in advance, for your response.

Cheers,
Sankenbisha.

[Budfred]

It is unusual for a notebook to have a fan, they are usually cooled mostly through heatsinks and ventilation. I suspect that it is in fact your hard drive and that it is dying, which accounts for both problems. It would be a good idea to backup any important data now and look for a replacement hard drive. Depending on how comfortable you are with messing with computer hardware, you may be able to put a new one in yourself. To make sure this is the issue, you could download the diagnostics utilities from the drive manufacturer and check it.

[YODA74]

It's possable the fan is making most of the noise there aren't many moving parts in a laptop so your limited as to what is making the noise the fan would not make it freeze up basically the fans inside a laptop are for just ventilation.

[superdrumr]

It sounds to me like your laptop, primarily the hard drive, is on the way out. I would immediately back up all of your work and files. If you can afford it you'd probably save yourself a lot of trouble my getting a new laptop. If you can't then i wish you luck in trying to find and fix whatever is going wrong