Hello, everyone.
Recently, my computer has started to act up. When I turn it on, it emmits a sort of electronic hissing noise whenever it thinks. The noise isn't loud, but present none-the-less. It takes about 15 tries for the computer to actually fully boot, restarting in between each try on its own. Finally, when it is all set, I'll be working on something, and it will randomly restart again, without any warning at all. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!


My room temperature is usually anywhere from 63-70 degrees

Sounds to me that it is either your Power Supply or a hard drive. There are no part to make that noise otherwise (Besides a CPU Fan/Heat sink losing its ball bearings). Your best bet is to open the computer case, and when you power it on, try to listen to where the noise is coming from. If it is coming from your Power Supply, go get a new one. If it is your Hard Drive, go get a new one, if it is a heatsink fan, get a new one lol. Sorry to tell you but it does sound like a hardware issue. Most times if it is electronic hissing, its the powersupply, but it could be the hard drive going out and trying to spin up, but is either losing power, or the disks on the inside are loose. Either way, you might have to shell out some money for a new something lol. Reply back when you open the case and find the source of the noise.

It could be a capacitor going bad on the motherboard or in the power supply. As suggested take the cover off and listen to where the noise originates from.

Actually, we had our power supply zapped by lightning (through the surge and all!) and in a pinch we replaced it with another supply that wasn't made for my computer...so that might just be it.

That was about 6 months ago so I figured it was working alright. I will take the case off and take a listen like you said. Thanks for the tips! I'll keep you updated!

You could try unplugging the Hard drives to see if the computer reboots like you explained with them out of the equation. I usually associate Hard drives with a hum or click so you are probably right in looking at the PS.

I had the same. Turned out it was the CPU fan faulty and the CPU shutting down. simply replaced heatsink and fan - $23.00 did the trick

Sometimes when the power supply gets zapped by an electrical surge such as from a lightning stike the motherboard can be damaged as well.

Awesome. Thanks for all the info everybody! I'll definately be looking into that soon. I figured it was probably either a fan issue or a power supply issue...but couldn't be sure. It's good to know that it could be one of the other things too. I hope that it's just the fan and will cost me only 25 dollars! That would be a miracle! Thanks again, and I'll keep you all updated as the drama unfolds

Just FWIW - I had an ATI TVWonderVE card that took a lighting strike. It continued to work, but I had many system problems until I removed it.

So, it could be almost any piece of hardware in the system that's causing this - it'll take some troubleshooting to figure out exactly what's causing it.