PC sounds like its speeding up when scanning

GBX

Whenever I run a virus/adware/spyware scan on my pc, it gets quite loud ... its like its speeding up and sounds like it might take off. What might be the reason behind this?

I have a Fujitsu Siemens:
XP Home
Ram 1gb
Pentium 4 processor edit ... its actually 3.2 ghz

any help/info is appreciated:cool:

Ruu_Old

Probably because its the hard drive is looking and scanning for files at a fast speed. I wouldn't be too worried unless the sound begins to become high pitched or makes a cranking noise.

GBX

ok .. well one thing that also happens is that when it fires up at a high rev speed .. it sometimes powers off...

ShiverinEskimo

sounds to me like CPU/Chipset is heating up with the load and so the fan speed is automatically increased to compensate - if it cuts the computer out you may have a cooling problem

astrofool

It's probably the fans speeding up as the cpu/ram/hd generate more heat due to extra usage during the scan.

If it turns off, then its either a power or heat problem, first thing to try is to get all the dust out of the machine and all of the fans, if its a power problem, then the PSU might need replaced (might be under warranty). You could also run a program like prime95 to stress the PC for a while to see if the crashing repeats.

Also, turn off automatic restart, and the blue screen might tell you what the problem is in right click my computer, select properties, click advanced tab, then go to startup and recovery setting, and uncheck the "automatically restart" box.

Also, as a precaution, download all the updates from windowsupdate, and maybe update a few of the drivers on the machine (motherboard and graphics card being the important ones).

GBX

the "automaticall restart" button was already unchecked. ill clean out any dust later. I do that regular anyway.