Grinding noise

Start by looking for a drive light.

Is it the hard drive, or the floppy drive?

If the hard drive, some occasional noise is normal. Windows accesses the drive from time to time even if you are not doing anything.

If the floppy drive is coming on, some program is trying to access the floppy drive.

This could be normal if you have certian anti-virus programs installed.

Windows also looks to verify that the links to recent files are still valid.
If you read, or stored a file from/onto a floppy, windows will check the drive for the file from time to time.

Other causes:
Virus trying to infect floppy,
AdWare / SpyWare checking for files
Hard drive starting to fail. This should only be a concern if the drive is now a lot louder, or is makeing a different sound than it used to when you open or save files.

Chas

If it was the disk drive, you would probably have had a failure by now. Fans in power supplys can get real noisy. The real problem is when the noise quits, because the next step is that they overheat.

I hope it's your fan... Was the machine moved recently? try banging on the case a little [figuratively] to move the fan blades away from the case.

If it's the hard drive, back it up now.

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