The first warning of a serious problem in our everyday life often reaches us through our ears. The dripping noise that indicates a plumbing leak, the knocking or pinging that signals car trouble, the buzzing that warns you of nearby bees -- these and other helpful sounds let you discover and react to a potential crisis. The same holds true of the hardware that runs your IT system. Pay attention to the following cries for help from your components.

Grinding or clicking sounds: If you hear a rhythmic grinding or clicking noise coming from a workstation or server, you could be hearing a hard drive entering its mechanical death agonies. Back up any data to another drive (or the cloud) immediately -- and consider replacing the ailing hard drive with an SSD (which lacks moving parts).

Whirring sounds: A whirring sound could also indicate hard drive trouble if the drive is spinning up and down frequently. Otherwise, your computer fan may be running unusually hard, which in turn indicates that the hardware may have developed a hard-to-control thermal issue. This is almost certainly the case if the fan keeps running even when the rest of the device sits idle.

Buzzing, whining, or other speaker noises: Do your laptop’s speakers insist on emitting buzzing or other odd noises when they’re not supposed to be sending any audio at all? This problem may mean that one of the speaker’s connecting wires has come loose or sustained damage. If you keep hearing the strangeness with a different speaker connected, then the trouble may lie with internal ground loop feedback or an external signal bleeding into weakly-shielded cables.

If you don’t like what you hear from your hardware, let the Austin business IT support experts at Gravity Systems have a listen. Contact us today to request your help!