beep the speaker

my computer is making awful sounds! and i mean that in the bad way! it emits this terrible racket that sounds like a detuned engine revving up, & every so often it will start to sound this little two-tone "siren": it sounds sort of like a midi ambulance. click here to listen!

right now we suspect that the grinding engine noise is a fan that is dying, most likely the heat sink. and i think the alarm noise is my motherboard trying to tell me that my cpu is overheating (or at least it thinks it's overheating).

the siren keeps becoming more frequent: in fact this computer has been on maybe 20 minutes and the siren just started up again! looks like we're for some good times trying to upgrade some of my hardware...