Computer making an odd noise..

My computer is making a weird periodic "pop" or "tock" noise while I play MP3s. It's been happening off and on for the past few days and I have no idea why it's happening or where it came from. It isn't super loud or anything, just a sort of strange pop every 10~15 seconds or so. It's not the songs themselves and the noise isn't coming from the speakers at all. It seems to be coming from the computer itself, I took the housing off and it seems to be coming from the top near the CD tray or something. Weird.

Sometimes it makes it when there isn't an MP3 playing, but very rarely and usually only once instead of every 10 seconds.

I am going to stop trolling for a few minutes. This only happens like once a week so listen up

You can really have some good times with your computer. You seriously should learn to fix it yourself. Nobody cares about how it runs but you. If you take it to some jackhole and tell him to fix it, it's not going to get done right. Even if you have a father/brother/boyfriend/whatever that you LIVE with who is a Lunix tard and fixes computers for a living, he can't fix it like you can. Even if you're mediocre at best dealing with hardware. Only you use it enough to make a true diagnosis of your computer's health.

Start troubleshooting. Rule everything you can out, then make an educated guess about the source. You know where all the components came from (or have at least a good guess). You know that hard disk failure is probably not the culprit because it's new. Did you install Windows from scratch on it, or did you use some utility to move it from your old disk (like MaxBlast/dd/etc.)? Can you consistantly get your disk to register in the BIOS? Can you make it consistantly fail? If either is true, you found the cause. Try replacing the IDE cable. If that fixes it, you found the cause. Try removing one stick of RAM and see if the problem happens still. If so, take it out and try the other. If still, try one stick in the other DDR channel or another slot. If that still doesn't fix it, you ruled out a RAM error too. Remove all PCI cards but the graphics. Remove all other disk drives. If this doesn't fix it, you've ruled out the possibility of a power drought (not enough power from the power supply causes brownouts that show this kind of behaviour).

Try anything else reasonable you can think of. If all else fails, you have a bad IDE channel on the motherboard. In that case, you need a new motherboard.

>>1
1. Check that your hard disks are in UltraDMA mode.
2. Check that you have the latest drivers for your motherboard.
3. Check that you have the latest drivers for your sound system.
4. Check that you have your mixing quality set to the maximum in sound options somewhere, explore the Control Panel.
5. ???
6. PROFIT

lawl it was an approaching head crash. Luckily it was my slave drive and I have plenty of backups. Case closed.