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My laptop, after using it for a while will suddenly jerk and vibrate like a phone, and you can hear a loud engine noise.

Can anyone figure what might be wrong with the laptop for you to hear a loud engine noise? Could it be the fan overheating or something?

*checks that this is not in testing*

Ah, ok... engine noise?

It could be a fan, or it could be the hard drive. Can you hear the difference between the two?

Either way, it's a good bet that its bad. Is the laptop hot when this happens/does it happen faster if you do a lot of cpu/gpu intensive work? It could be a broken fan that starts to vibrate when it increases speed, and that is a bad thing (tm) that needs to be fixed.

haard wrote:*checks that this is not in testing*

Ah, ok... engine noise?

It could be a fan, or it could be the hard drive. Can you hear the difference between the two?

Either way, it's a good bet that its bad. Is the laptop hot when this happens/does it happen faster if you do a lot of cpu/gpu intensive work? It could be a broken fan that starts to vibrate when it increases speed, and that is a bad thing (tm) that needs to be fixed.

The laptop is hot when it happens as it manage to run fine for a few minutes 10-15 minutes at the most without the noise.

Damn, I need to find a way to recover my data from my laptop...

Although I can't tell the difference of the sound of the fan or the hard drive.

Whenever the noise started, all of my windows basically crash while I can still move the cursor. The moment I close the computer physically, the noise will stop immediately.

An immediate stop. I mean a fan can't stop spinning that fast right?

Guessing here - disk reading error?.
A faulty disk can make quite a lot of noise, although I don't know if it is an 'engine sound' really. Is it a fast tapping or scratching sound? That would make taking backups and doing nothing else before those backups are taken a priority...

haard wrote:Guessing here - disk reading error?.
A faulty disk can make quite a lot of noise, although I don't know if it is an 'engine sound' really. Is it a fast tapping or scratching sound? That would make taking backups and doing nothing else before those backups are taken a priority...

How do I put it...it sounded like a fan kicking into overdrive. How do I do backup if I can only use the computer for less than 5 minutes before the sound starts?

Take your most important files and put them on a flash drive or mail them to yourself.

A while back I had a problem where my primary drive would sound like it was powering off, then start back up at full throttle at random. It was getting so bad that browsing the internet would cause my mp3s to stutter. Are you running Windows XP? If so give this a shot:

First, right-click My Computer, click Properties.
Click the hardware tab, then click Device Manager.
From there locate and click the Disk Drives box. It should drop down and show one or more drives.
Right-click on the drive and select Uninstall. If you have multiple drives do it to those as well.
Restart your computer.

After you restart you’ll see Windows locate and reintegrate your drives as though you installed new ones. I hope that helps.