A very noisy boot up?

muffler

I bought a second hand desktop PC and while it's running fine it makes an awful "whooshing" noise at startup. Sounds a bit like a hair dryer at a high speed. It would run for about 4 minutes and I see the disk usage reading around 99%. This happens both when booting up and bringing the PC out of standby.

So is this the disk thats making this noise or is it the fan(s) or maybe both? And is it doing any harm?

I know from owning a couple of PCs in the past that they can give an odd "whoosh" when booting up but usually just for a few seconds and certainly not for a 4 minute period.

Appreciate any advice or comments. Cheers

ED E

1-5 seconds is the bios testing them at startup.


More than that, its the temperature. Boot requires the OS to do a lot of work, but shouldnt be enough to keep the fans really killing it. This suggests your thermals aren't great. Spec? Cooling? An AMD processor with a free cooler can be pretty loud as they run hot.

muffler

Thanks for the reply.

Its a HP model, Windows 10, Intel i3 3220 CPU (4 x 3.30GHz), I Gb NVidia GT 710 graphics

Sorry, not very well up on these matters so cant find any other details or rather I dont know where to look

Skerries

have you opened it up to look to see if the insides are clean?
if not do that and try and clean it preferably with canned air and do not use a hoover

muffler

Skerries wrote: »

have you opened it up to look to see if the insides are clean?
if not do that and try and clean it preferably with canned air and do not use a hoover

Thanks, I'll give that a go this afternoon.

muffler

Took the side casing off and not a fan to be see. They are obviously there somewhere but must be located under other things and Im not confident enough to remove bits and pieces from the inside of it.

what potential problems could this issue with the fans cause?

bonzodog2

muffler wrote: »

Took the side casing off and not a fan to be see. They are obviously there somewhere but must be located under other things and Im not confident enough to remove bits and pieces from the inside of it.

what potential problems could this issue with the fans cause?

Fans being on a lot and overheating.
There will be one in the PSU (box about 4x3x5) and one on top of the CPU, which could be obscured by a plastic duct, and optionally some extra case ventilation fan(s).

I would start with a CPU temp monitoring software, e.g. Coretemp

If it gets really hot it will shut down, but thats not a great plan

Post a photo!

muffler

When I had the side of the unit removed I took a couple of pics. Apologies for the poor quality but for some reason or other my camera was playing up a bit. Anyhow I think you'll get the gist of it all.

ED E

The air comes in from the front (around the USB ports) and flows out fins you see mid case (Silver fins, copper pipes in the middle).


You can remove the shroud (black plastic) to get at it, but really blasting an air can in the front would be plenty. You'll see a cloud of dust if its working.

bonzodog2

In pic#1, PSU is top right, optical drive is bottom right, with HDD below. CPU fan is left midway, maybe some ducting top left

edit:Dealz sometimes have canned air at 1.49. Maplin is prob 10x price

muffler

Thanks guys. Im fine for canned air as I bought 6 tins of it on Amazon a few months ago - was on offer for around €6 or so.

I'll give that a blast tomorrow so.

@ED E - I assume that black plastic shroud / cover is easy enough to remove?

ED E

Yeah, either two screws or quick release clips. The manual will document it well if you grab that from the HP support site.

scamalert

id imagine that pipe sucks air to cpu and would have some sort of fan be it at front or near cpu,if theres no fan pointing to cpu them aliuminium fins are useless and youd be better off putting stock cooler on,to save eventual cpu failure.

specs look ok but layout is total mess,i wouldnt be too worried taking whole case apart,theres basically ram,gpu which you pull out,cpu is trickier,but not rocket science,good blast of air all fans and mb and tidy layout.

Since its good practice to reconnect wires and making sure all are snug and tight,since if thats not the culprit its lacks of cooling coming in that makes rest fans compensate if they are connected to MB.

Check cpu-z temps on cpu and mb,also msi afterburner for gpu temps,if not clean isntall would do one as well to get rid of previous users datadumps.

muffler

Right, I opened up the PC again and managed to get the cover removed (very simple btw) and while the blades on the fan were a little dirty they werent too bad at all. Managed to get most if not all the little bits of dust and dirt off them and put everything back and while the PC booted up fine and I was able to go online the fan still ran for over 12 minutes.

Im attaching a few pics showing the fan before cleaning and one pic is also a clearer version of what I posted earlier showing the overall internal layout.

muffler

Also showing a screen grab of system info.

I downloaded the Coretemp app (or whatever its called) and while the screen grab shows what its doing just after boot up about an hour ago it was pretty much the same last night after I finished playing a COD game.

Im not into the technical stuff obviously but the coretemp is showing 2 cores. Should that not be 4 cores?

On a more general note I have the option of returning this PC and getting a refund. I know its difficult for you guys to assess everything just based on description and pics posted on an internet forum by a PC novice but Im worried in case this problem gets worse or is causing problems elsewhere with parts of the computer that could lead to it being borked completely. Knowing my luck this would happen and at a time when I wouldn't get money back. I'm just wondering if I'm worrying needlessly or should I just return it before something more serious arises

scamalert

what does it say where fan is connected should be small letters cpu,was taking close look and its hard to see but dont see any other fan connectors,since on most MB there are 1-2 system fans,and they are controlled separately either wia wiring bios or software,where cpu adjusts itself accordingly,thus if sitting in wrong slot fans spin not based on cpu but MB temps or presets.

muffler

scamalert wrote: »

what does it say where fan is connected should be small letters cpu,was taking

Sorry dont really understand the question. Should there be letters or digits on a sticker on part of the casing inside the unit, is that what you are referring to?

scamalert

edit:found the pic of your mb,theres only 2 fan connectors pinkish ones and its chassis fan chafan says under if you zoom in,not sure how old the mb is but id check bios and see if theres controls for it,to set speed, otherwise just get silent fan under 800rpm.Seems quite odd board without cpu fan connection, but given temps seems passive cooler works fine .

muffler

From what I can see on looking at the properties in different bits and bobs in the device manager it looks like the original PC was made in 2006 so its fairly old in a way.

My son was trying to boot it up and hitting F12 (might have been F2) in order to access the bios if thats the right term. he was saying he might be able to change the fan settings that way but it seems the monitor is too slow in displaying things at boot up and he wasnt able to do this. Any other way of altering the fan speeds or run time or whatever?

Cuddlesworth

Thermal paste is probably shot, that thing is around 6 years old.

Its 2 cores, 4 threads btw.

scamalert

theres many things id change in your situation,case is basically suffocation box for quite decent specs.adding couple fans connected to psu would be a start given summer coming and it will be like oven inside.

also get into bios del key is most often used or should at least promt on the screen,since dont imagine it boots in 15seconds to miss it,doubt there will be fan settings on such old MB but you can try to reset them to default settings,and yes thermal paste change wouldn't hurt.Since Cuddlesworth has valid point them cpus have thermal sensor thus it might be giving signal to speed up fan,thus theoretically temps would rise quite quick one booted and given minimal air supply on passive cooler its a while before it gets cool enough.

TerrorFirmer

Temps seem quite low so unlikely to be thermal paste related as even running at high speed a fan wouldn't get temps that low if the paste was the issue? (unless the fan ramps up when the cpu hits a relatively low threshold)

Those are PWM headers so something is telling the fan to ramp up.

You can get a fan resistor to limit the fan speed.

The PC also isn't from 2006 it's from about 2011-2012, the CPU is still half-decent (and can be upgraded to i5) but the GT710 is an ultra low end media card, not designed for games. You would be massively increased performance with a better card, even a second hand GTX750Ti for €60 would be about 5 times faster.

It's also not a passive cooler, the intake fan/shroud guide air over the cooler. At the moment I wouldn't quite call it a suffocation box, even under full 100% load the amount of power being consumed by the full system would be around 100w and the GT710 generates almost no heat.

Anyway this is a fan resistor:

scamalert

TerrorFirmer your right thought his gpu was better.Anyway yes smth is telling for fan to ramp up speeds,thats why bios restore to default should be tried,might reset some sensor thats went haywire.

muffler

Guys, thanks very much for all the input and advice. Really appreciated.

Rightly or wrongly I've decided to return it as the seller hasnt a problem with giving a refund. Im just not happy with it and even though a couple of upgrades could be done I would still be worried. If there's a problem at the beginning then there's a good chance that other problems will arise in the future so in that regard my heart just isnt in it.

One final question for you if you dont mind. I had already transferred some work documents to it which on face value I can just remove again but I know that PC's log everything so how do I go about erasing traces of this without interfering with or removing anything else that would have been on the PC before I bought it?

I want to make sure that the PC is returned in the same state as I received it but I dont want to leave a record of any of the personal stuff I was using it for.

muffler

muffler wrote: »

One final question for you if you dont mind. I had already transferred some work documents to it which on face value I can just remove again but I know that PC's log everything so how do I go about erasing traces of this without interfering with or removing anything else that would have been on the PC before I bought it?

I want to make sure that the PC is returned in the same state as I received it but I dont want to leave a record of any of the personal stuff I was using it for.

Anyone?

ED E

1. Make a new admin account
2. Delete the account you were using
3. Wipe free space (such as with CCLeaner)

muffler

ED E wrote: »

1. Make a new admin account
2. Delete the account you were using
3. Wipe free space (such as with CCLeaner)

Im okay with No. 3 but how do I create a new Admin account and delete the other?

Would this then leave the PC back to the way it was when I got it and will the seller be able to log in/use it again? I take it no password is necessary for a new admin account?

Sorry, Im a bit of a numpty when it comes to these things

scamalert

once you create another account , go to settings manage accounts select new account created and should be setting there, to set it admin account,or alternatively it might let you pick that option when creating account.same for deletion select manage accounts pick account and remove.