Hey, I registered here hoping someone could help me out with a problem i just recently been having with my computer.

I have a Dell Dimension 2350, and lately, I've been hearing a loud scratching sound coming from the back of my computer. I'm pretty sure it's not the hard drive making the sound, but a fan. There seems to be two fans in the back, and it's the lower one, if any of you know which one I'm talking about. I took the cover off and tried to clean the dust from it, and turned it on again and the noise continued.

As for my cd burner, I never had any problems with this until now. I tried to burn an audio cd, and it seems to work fine, but after it's done and i put the cd into my cd player, the cd player doesn't reconize it, and it doesn't work. I also tried it in a different cd player and have the same problem. Also, i notice that when i put a cd into my burner, it makes a weird scanning type of noise.

I would really appriciate it if someone here could help me

If any more information is needed let me know, thanks.

That fan sounds like it's on it's last legs. You'll need to replace it, and quick. The upper fan is usually the PSU, but you say that's okay. So it's either the one on the processor or the graphics card. Processor fans are easily replaces, graphics cards not so. Best find out exactly whcih one is at fault, and bring the culprit to a PC store.

The other problem is odd, but may be related. Is the burned CD recognisable in Windows? What program do you use to burn it? It could be the fact that your processor fan is failing, the processor is heating up, so it slows down to compensate, and is therefore unable to keep up with sending the data to the CD burner (any buffer underrun protection?)

Strange noises are never good, is there much dust in the drive? Does the drive make the strained noise reading all CDs? (If it's a corrupt disk, it'll struggle to find a valid data track anyway). You are welcome to view www.gidforums.com where he finds there's dust on the support rails for the laser & cleans it. It solves a different problem to yours, and is a "purely-at-your-own-risk" solution, but it may help you out.

Is your computer in a dusty atmosphere?
GF

I took the cover off and cleaned out all the dust i saw, very carefully. Yeah, I would say it's in a pretty dusty atmosphere. I called up a computer shop and told the guy about the fan and he said it probably just needs to be replaced.

As for the cd burner, I use Roxio to burn cds, but I don't think that's the problem because i've used it before a lot and never had the same problems. When I burn a cd, the program says the cd burned successfully, but when i flip the cd over and look at it, you know how you can tell how much was burnt on a cd by the ring? Well there are a bunch of gaps between the rings, so I figure either the lens is dirty or something. I don't really want to try to open it up and clean the lens myself, I'll ask the guy at the computer shop to look at that too.

Thanks for the help Garth, and yeah I think you're right about the processor being unable to send the data to burn the cd, due to the bad fan.

I understand that pentium4s slow down to compensate for too much heat but unless it slows down to 100mhz I doubt it will affect burning CDs. My box burns CDs and I have a Pentium 1...

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All your base are... a bunch of cheap, low-res pixels on an overheating box.

Hmm, I took my computer into the shop and the guy there told me that my cd burner was probably worn out or something. So he installed another cd burner, and when i got home i hooked it back up and I STILL can't burn audio cd's. I can burn data cd's but not audio. I asked him if it was the faulty fan that could be causing it to not work but he said no. So what else could be causing this problem if it's not the cd burners fault? I tried burning it at 8X btw, and it still didn't work. :-(