No PC is truly silent, but your computer shouldn’t be noisier than your lawnmower. If you have to turn up your music just to drown out the whirring or grinding noises your computer makes, you may want to look into that—it could be the first signal of some serious problems.

Knowing how to tell different hard drive noises apart and learning what they might mean, can save your computer. Or at least give you an unequivocal pass to buy a new one.

Clicking or grinding noises

Let’s start with the most worrisome sound. If your computer starts to click, grind, or make any sort of low-pitched buzzing noise, you should stop what you’re doing and check the hard drive. This sound could indicate a dying disk. Do not ignore this sound.

To check your drive’s health, I recommend a third-party tool like CrystalDiskInfo (Windows) or DriveDx (macOS). Fire up the program, click on each of your drives in the menu, and make sure they’re all listed as “Good.” If it indicates your drive is anything less than that, you should back up all your data as soon as possible. You may still have some time to do so—occasionally a drive marked “Caution” can still run for years, but if it’s making noises, the drive’s death might be close. Once all your files are safe, consider replacing your drive with an SSD—not only will it likely last longer, but it’ll make your computer feel much faster. If your hard drives are healthy, take the incident as a warning and avoid any unpleasant surprises by backing up your data regularly, because as it happens to any living creature, all hard drives will die one day.

One you’ve ruled out your hard drive as the culprit, you’ll need to dig a little deeper to find the source of that clicking sound. If your computer still has a DVD drive, then it could be in the process of failing, and needs repair or replacement.

Finally, in a lot of desktop PCs, a clicking noise could just mean a cable has gotten too close to a fan, and is getting hit repeatedly by the blades. If you’re comfortable with a screwdriver, open up your PC and make sure the fans are clear of obstructions.

Loud whirring noises

If there’s one sound every computer user knows well, it’s the loud whoosh that comes from an overzealous fan running at full speed. On a desktop PC, this will likely be low-to-medium pitch like the video above, and on a laptop, it could be higher-pitched and much more annoying. The smaller the fan, the louder and higher pitched that noise will be.

If you’re hearing this, there’s a very good chance your machine just needs some cooling adjustment. You might also want to check your hard drive’s health, just in case, since a drive spinning up and down repeatedly could create a similar sound. Finally, check to see if there’s a disc spinning in the DVD drive—sometimes those can be obnoxiously loud even if they’re working properly.

If your fans are indeed too loud, start by opening Task Manager in Windows (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) or Activity Monitor in macOS (under Applications > Utilities) and see if any applications are taking up a large portion of your CPU. If your computer’s working hard, the fans will work hard to cool it, so you may have a program running in the background you forgot about, or malware eating up resources without you knowing. Close the offending program or run a malware scan to see if that helps.

If your computer is idle and still making fan noise, it could be overheating. A program like Core Temp (Windows) or Fanny (macOS) can tell you if your CPU is running hot. As a ballpark, if you aren’t running anything strenuous and your CPU is 70 degrees celsius or higher, I’d say that’s abnormal, and will likely cause excessive fan noise. If you’re using your laptop in bed, make sure to put a tray or anything solid under it—your clothes, skin or blankets might be preventing the system from cooling off, making the fans work harder and louder. The same happens with accumulated dust, so give the fan grilles a few passes with a dust blower, or better yet, an electric duster. If you feel comfortable, you might even want to open up your machine and wipe the dust off the fan with a clean microfiber cloth.

Finally, if you have a desktop PC—especially one you built yourself—you may just need to adjust the fan curves in the BIOS. Some of your fans may be running at 75% or 100% all the time by default, which is unnecessary. Or, the curves may be set in a weird spot that causes the fans to constantly ramp up for a few seconds to cool the CPU, but then they ramp back down, allowing the CPU to get hot again. Press *Delete* as your computer starts to enter the BIOS screen, and look for any fan control settings you can play with—try a lower setting, but don’t set them too low, lest your temperatures get too high.

Sounds coming from your speakers, even when you aren’t playing anything

Put your ear closer to the sound—is it coming from inside your computer or is it coming from the speakers? Speakers are supposed to make sound, but if you’re hearing noise from them even when your computer isn’t playing audio, something might be wrong. Make sure the speaker cable is plugged all the way in to your PC—you’ll usually hear a click that tells you the cable is fully connected, but sometimes you have to really shove it to get that last millimeter in. If that doesn’t work, you can troubleshoot your speakers by plugging them into another device (like your phone) to see if the sound persists. The problem could be in your speaker’s cable, or it could just be feedback from the internals of your PC, in which case a USB sound card, also known as a DAC, might help.

You might also be experiencing a ground loop, in which case a ground loop isolator can reduce the noise. I’ve even had speakers that picked up faint radio signals due to poorly shielded cables, which is a remarkably spooky experience.

Ultimately, there are so many things that can cause unwanted noise from speakers that we could probably write a whole article on the subject—but if you play around with your connections, you may be able to narrow down the source, and replace the offending component.

Buzzing or screeching noises

If none of the above have fixed the problem, but you’re still hearing a buzzing sound, it could be just about anything. Heck, if they’re mild enough, any of the above problems could be described as “buzzing,” so check your hard drive and running processes before you move on.

Once you’ve discarded all the scenarios above, my first guess would be that you’re experiencing coil whine—one of my least favorite noises in computing, since there’s often little you can do about it.

Coil whine happens when the coils in your components start vibrating at just the right frequency to start making a very annoying noise. It can be anywhere from a low-pitched buzz to a high pitched squeal, and often happens when your computer is under load. If you can pinpoint the source, you might be able to mitigate the noise, at least to some degree. For example, in gaming PCs, coil whine commonly comes from the graphics card when it’s doing a lot of work, in which case you can decrease your graphics settings or turn on VSync to lighten the load. I’ve also heard coil whine on a lot of power adapters—if you move your laptop or monitor’s power brick further away, it may not be as annoying. Some laptop manufacturers may even offer other power adapters without the old school “brick” that may coil whine less. In other cases, there’s nothing you can do, and you’ll have to suffer through the noise.

If you aren’t convinced the buzzing sound is coil whine, you might also look back at your fans. If they are vibrating against the steel case of your desktop PC, some rubber dampeners may help stop the sound. Your fans may also need lubrication, so a small drop of sewing machine oil in the bearing of an old fan can make it run like new again. And if you have one of the ever-so-trendy all-in-one liquid cooling units in your gaming PC, make sure it’s mounted properly, and check the manual to see if the pump is adjustable—turning the pump speed down could lessen the buzzing sound it makes.

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There are few things more soul-crushing than losing that last photo of grandma, or videos of your child’s first steps. But SD cards can be fussy, and occasionally those photos can get corrupted or accidentally deleted. And it’s not like you can just recreate those photos after the moment’s passed.

The good news is that if you still have that SD card, you still have hope.

How file recovery works

This may come as a shock to you, but when you delete a file from an SD card (or hard drive, or flash drive) that data isn’t erased right away—instead, your computer just marks that space as available for re-writing. Even though you can’t see the files, they’re still there until your camera (or computer) overwrites them with something else. That means that if you haven’t taken too many new photos, you might be able to get those old ones back.

So if you lost or accidentally deleted files off an SD card, the first thing you must do is stop using it. Don’t take any more pictures—remove it from your camera and set it aside. If you keep snapping away, you might overwrite the photos you’ve lost, and then you really won’t be able to get them back.

Be ready to pay a little money if things get tough. We’ll go through two free recovery programs here, but if they can’t find what you’re looking for, it may be worth trying a paid one instead—sometimes one program will find files that others missed. You’re not going at it blind, though—most paid programs will let you scan the drive for free, at which point you can pony up to actually recover the files. A few bucks is usually a small price to pay for those irreplaceable family photos.

Let’s get started.

Windows: Recover your files with Recuva

Recuva is a free tool that can be a little finicky, but it’s a good place to start. Install Recuva like you would any other Windows program and start it up. If, for some reason, it doesn’t launch, it may be conflicting with a driver on your PC or an antivirus program—this is a somewhat common issue, and I was able to get it to launch by booting into Safe Mode. (Just hold Shift while restarting the computer, head to Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Startup Settings, and restart into Safe Mode with Networking.) I also had to plug my SD card in using a USB card reader, rather than my laptop’s built-in SD card slot, though your mileage may vary.

Recuva’s Wizard will attempt to make the scan a bit speedier by asking you what you’re looking for. The first time you go through, I recommend choosing Pictures on My Media Card or iPod, but you can choose All Files from All Drives if you prefer to catch everything humanly possible—it’ll just take longer.

Recuva will then present you with a list of files it found. In my case, it found about 13 deleted photos I’d taken for work a couple years ago, and I was able to recover all but one of them (which had probably been partially overwritten with new data at some point). If the software found a lot of files, note that checking each box can be a tedious task, so I recommend selecting the first photo, holding Shift, then selecting the last photo to highlight them all. Then, right-click on a photo and choose Check Highlighted to mark every photo for recovery. Click the Recover button to find a place for them on your computer’s hard drive. Do not recover them to the SD card, or you may overwrite the files before they can be recovered.

If you don’t find everything the first time, try re-running Recuva and doing a Deep Scan—it’ll take longer, but you might get lucky. When I ran a deep scan, Recuva found about 35 photos from years ago that it didn’t find in the initial scan.

Mac: Recover your files with LazeSoft Mac Data Recovery

If you’re a Mac user, I recommend starting with a freeware program called LazeSoft Mac Data Recovery. It isn’t pretty, but it’s completely free, and worked remarkably well in my tests. Install the program as you would any other, then start it up and select either a Fast Scan or a Deep Scan. (A deep scan will find more, but will take longer.) Select your SD card when prompted, and let it do its thing.

When LazeSoft is done scanning, you’ll have a list of folders in the left sidebar you can browse through. It doesn’t show thumbnails, so it can take some time to find the photos you’re looking for. Once you do, you can check them off and click on Save Files along the top to recover them to your hard drive. Again, remember not to recover them to the SD card, or you may overwrite the files before they can be recovered. Be sure to check through all the folders in the sidebar to make sure you catch every photo that’s available for recovery.

What to do if you don’t find what you’re looking for

Here’s the thing: the above programs are great first efforts, but they’re free for a reason. If you aren’t finding everything you want to recover, it’s time to try something a bit heftier, like Disk Drill ($89, for Windows and Mac), EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard ($70 per month or $100 per year, for Windows), or Ontrack EasyRecovery ($79 per year, for Windows and Mac). When I tested these programs, I found 200 photos—a far cry from the 51 found in Recuva’s deep scan—plus a couple of videos, taken so long ago I barely remembered them. All three options will scan your drive for free, but will only recover between 500MB and 1GB of data before you have to pay. Honestly, that’s a pretty good deal. Try one or all of them before you pony up to make sure you get the maximum amount of recovered photos possible.

If they still can’t do the trick, you may be out of luck. But if those lost photos are incredibly important to you, a data recovery service like DriveSavers or LC Technology may be able to recover files that consumer-level software can’t—at a cost of hundreds or even over a thousand dollars. So you’ll have to decide if recovering those photos is actually worth potentially spending that amount of money.

Whether you’re able to recover your photos or not, remember that the story doesn’t end here—you’ll also want to do everything in your power from preventing this in the future. Copy your photos to your PC early and often, properly eject your SD card before removing it from your PC, and have a good backup strategy in place, so those photos never disappear.

Related: Find the best micro SD cards.

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