Recently my computer has started making a continuous clicking noise whenever I run wow. I have updated everything and defragged the hard drive. I’m not sure what it could be but it only makes the noise when I run wow.exe and no other time. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Time to buy new storage. I recommend a solid-state drive of comparable capacity.
Seems odd that it only happens with one program though? Anyone else have any thoughts?
Do you play any other games or anything with it? Anything that draws a good amount of power?
Are you sure it’s the hardware and not something happening in-game? I remember one of the battle text addons was making small click noises a while back.
As soon as I click play and the game loads the first screen the clicking noise starts up. It continues non-stop until wow.exe is closed then its gone. Ive opened other apps on my computer and i cannot get it to make the noise again. I haven’t changed any hardware and only ensured everything was updated. I have a laptop and made sure the fans were cleaned out thinking maybe it had to do with something in a fan and that changed nothing.
On the character screen? Or in-game?
character screen/ loading servers etc
Is it a brief click noise? Or more like a ding? If it’s the first one, you might have another app trying to fight for control of the screen, or an add-on that is sending errors over and over while trying to work with the game client. To verify, you’ve tried without add-ons, right? This means relocating them to another folder/renaming the folder, not just using the disable function.
Its a click that happens about every 1/2 second non stop. I have not tried to remove all the down loads to see if that works. Ill copy and paste the folder then remove it and try that option.
You only need to rename it temporarily, you don’t have to move them. When the game launches, it won’t be able to load them from the renamed directory.
so just change the folder name?
Yes, rename the folder aka the directory where they are installed.
Tried that out and noted that no add on folder loaded in the game. However, it did not change anything. Starting to think that its legit the hard drive crashing on me.
You said it doesn’t happen with other apps, but never specifically said games. Have you tried another game? Have you dropped your PC recently, exposed it to magnets, accidentally hit it or shook it, exposed it to liquid?
It could be a power issue due to a faulty PSU if it only happens on games/intensive apps which is why I asked if happens with other games
I have seen something very specifically like this. It’s an early sign of hard drive failure.
It manifests when only a few sectors begin to force rapid re-reads (the repeated clicking) to conclude a read cycle. Those sectors may be suffering surface failure, but this kind of thing tends to spread and cause more files to require hardware-level retries to successfully read, and the earlier files will corrupt beyond recoverability.
Could be something else, but this is the only think I know of that resembles what’s being described.
Still, you can check the built-in diagnostics to see if Windows thinks the drive is OK.