hearing soft clicking (?)

So i have had my powerbook since last april and it has been so silent. Now (just noticed it a few minutes ago..) it has a little clicking every other minute or so.

Now I know this sound is normal for laptops, but I know my last laptop before this one, it did that clicking sound often right before it died.. and I believe I was told the clicking was from the harddrive.

Does anyone know what the clicking really is, or if it actually is a bad thing?

It is very likely that it is your HD making the clicking sound. My iBook does it periodically. I am not having any problems with my iBook, and this has happened on my older PB G3's as well. It is not any real cause for alarm, and as long as everything is running smoothly, I would not worry about it if I were you.

I figured it's not a big problem and my pb is working fine, i just dont understand why it does that, and why I never heard it before. i just get alittle scared by the noise, cause it's the same sound that my old dell laptop did repeatedly before the HD would die.

I haven't heard the noise since I made the thread, but I havnt been listening closely.

october said:

So i have had my powerbook since last april and it has been so silent. Now (just noticed it a few minutes ago..) it has a little clicking every other minute or so.

Does anyone know what the clicking really is, or if it actually is a bad thing?

Click to expand...

The clicking sound is probably the sound of the drive head parking. That is a normal sound for hard drives and usually gets gradually louder as the drive ages. If the drive is running in such a way that the head parks constantly (really incesant clicking) then it can cause the drive mechanism to wear out pre-maturely. This is not really a problem that I've ever heard of on powerbooks running OS X though so I wouldn't worry about it.