What is my computer doing and why - it's driving me nuts?!?!

[Insulindude]

My computer (Emachines 3240, Win Xp service pack 3, pentiumR 4, 2.66ghz, 1mb ram) has become very noisy (the fans presumably) especially around mid evening but will also at other random times. The effect it has is slow down across the board, scrolling, page loading you name it - it suffers. The noise will increase further when I try and stream videos and do other similar tasks but when these finish or are terminated the noise again reduces. Many thanks for your time and any answers.

[bookbinder]

It sounds as if your computer is being asked to work too hard. Consider installing more RAM. Install as much extra RAM as the computer will take. Are you sure about the "1 mb"? Could it be really "1GB"? If so, 1GB is a bit on the low side.

[ChuckFickens]

I'd say it needs a clean out, the heatsinks are probably clogged with dust and fluff so the fans are having to work harder to try and keep it cool.

If it's getting noisy at a certain time every day and it's not due to something you are doing it's probably running a scan of some sort at that time.

[ChuckFickens]

And a lack of ram won't make the fans run faster, it may make the hard drive work more as the overflow from the ram has to be swapped to the hard drive.

(agree that 1GB is borderline minimum amount of RAM these days though)

[MarkRae]

As has been correctly suggested, you are at the very low edge of usability in terms of on-board RAM. All the specs (and some experts!) will tell you that 1GB is perfectly sufficient to run Windows XP - and they're right, so long as you don't want to do anything useful with it! But for anything which requires real processing power, it really isn't sufficient. The slowness is likely to be the machine actually running out of real memory and being forced to use part of its hard disk as "pretend" memory.

Luckily, according to various sites, the machine's on-board memory can be upgraded to 4GB: http://www.orcalogic....Memory-35060-m-1.htm. I'd suggest you do that.

You should also download and run malwarebytes just to make sure that the machine hasn't picked up any malware which is taking over the machine at various times.

Finally, I'd suggest getting one of these: http://www.maplin.co....off-airduster-345490, powering the machine off, taking it outside, removing as many of its panels as you can and giving its innards a good blast, especially the fan(s).

[Hymie]

Many processors are fitted with variable speed cooling fans – with the control circuitry increasing the fan speed when required.

Based on the above, and your reported symptoms – I would venture that your processor cooling fan has some slight obstruction (which is impeding the fan blade rotation). Since the fan cannot adequately cool the processor, it slows – and the fan makes more noise.

Take a close look at the processor cooling fan for any obvious obstructions – if none are evident, gently ease the fan away from the processor heat sink, which may be obstructing the fan.