Well, if you are comfortable pulling the machine apart I'd go through each scenario and disconnect an item each time to narrow it down. I'd put money on the hard drive to be honest. Those are what fail most often. The fans tend not to click at that low of a rate. It could be the CD. If it is a tray loading CD drive then try placing some light pressure against the drive door while it is clicking and see if you can feel the mechanism shifting at all.

But yeah, I'd guess HD with CD as a close second. I would certainly do a full drive backup immediately as a precaution.

I'm with ND. Clicking at that speed sounds like a hard drive to me.

Wreckin' freckin' IS people installed some new web filters on the company servers over the weekend. Luckily, this place is making it through (and, strangely, so is youtube!) but bloglines is now blocked. Any suggestions for other blog aggregators I should try?

Jon, you can try the Google Blog Reader. Our webfilters block a lot of stuff but they seem to let everything associated with Google through (for the moment, she adds darkly).

Thanks! I can access it so I'll give it a try.

Don't know if this has been mentioned but couldn't find it in a search, so for all you Mac users, follow this [link] to go to the BitsOnWheels site. The "first 100% Native B1tT0rrent client for the Macintosh."

Okay, techies....

My phone bill makes me vomit, and despite the incredibly annoying song in the commercials, Vonage is starting to tempt me. So....

Any and all of you who've had experience with internet phone service, what is your experience? Is that price they give (about $25 a month) real? Any surprise costs? How much of an initial investment is required to make it work? Can we transfer over our current phone number?

My Vonage experience was one of terrible call quality and even worse customer service, originally summarized here:

Jessica "Buffistechnology 2: You Made Her So She Growls?" Mar 5, 2005 3:57:38 pm PST

Price is real. Some people have had really poor quality with vonnage - poor sound, dropped calls. (Don't know if that is everyone.) Also 911 service is equivalent to what you get with cell phones. They don't automatically know your address. Comcast and possibly other cable companies offer equivalent services.

t X-post with Jesse

Comcast and possibly other cable companies offer equivalent services.

Not quite -- with a cable company's digital phone service, they give you more bandwidth to cover the voice calls (so your phone service won't slow down your internet, and your internet traffic won't interferre with phone calls). With Vonage, you're piggy-backing onto the bandwidth you already have with your internet service, and so both of these things can (and IME, DO) happen. I have digital phone from TWC now, and it's about a thousand times better than Vonage was in every respect.