Most computers don’t just die without warning. In our experience — over 25 years of repairing PCs and laptops in West Bromwich — the vast majority of serious failures are preceded by warning signs that appear weeks, sometimes months, before the machine finally gives up. The problem is that most people either don’t notice them, or notice them and assume they’ll sort themselves out.
They rarely do. But catching them early almost always means a cheaper, quicker fix. Here are the nine signs your computer is trying to tell you something.
1. The Fan Is Louder Than Usual or Runs Constantly
Your computer’s fan should run quietly in the background and speed up when the machine is working hard. If the fan is now loud most of the time — even when you’re just browsing the web — or runs constantly without ever settling down, something is wrong. The most common cause is dust build-up inside the case blocking the vents and forcing the fan to work overtime. Left untreated, this leads to overheating and component damage. A professional internal clean usually sorts it completely.
2. The Computer Is Slower Than It Used to Be
All computers slow down gradually over time as software accumulates, but a noticeable drop in performance — things that used to be instant now taking seconds, programmes taking longer to open, the whole machine feeling sluggish — is a sign that something needs attention. It might be a failing hard drive struggling to read data, a virus running silently in the background, or RAM that’s being overwhelmed. In any case, it’s worth finding out the actual cause rather than just putting up with it.
3. Strange Clicking or Grinding Noise From the Drive
This one is urgent. If you can hear a rhythmic clicking sound — sometimes called the “click of death” — or a grinding noise coming from inside your PC or laptop, your hard drive is very likely failing. Spinning hard drives contain physical moving parts, and these noises indicate that something mechanical is going wrong. Back up your data immediately and get it looked at. A drive that’s clicking can fail completely with no further warning, taking everything on it with it.
4. The Computer Takes Forever to Start Up
A healthy modern computer should be ready to use within a minute of starting up — often much less. If yours is sitting on a loading screen for three, four, five minutes before the desktop appears, that’s abnormal. It can point to a failing hard drive, a bloated startup programme list, Windows corruption, or simply a machine that desperately needs an SSD upgrade. Either way, it’s not something that’s going to improve on its own.
5. Programmes Crashing Randomly
The occasional crash happens — software isn’t perfect. But if programmes are closing unexpectedly on a regular basis, or you’re seeing error messages that weren’t there before, something is destabilising the system. Common causes include failing RAM (which causes all sorts of seemingly random errors), drive errors, overheating, or malware. Don’t just dismiss it as “the computer being funny” — frequent crashes are a meaningful warning sign.
6. The Computer Is Getting Very Hot to the Touch
Laptops in particular should be warm during use, but not uncomfortably hot. If you’re placing a laptop on your lap and it’s genuinely painful to touch on the underside, or a desktop is throwing out heat that you can feel from a distance, the cooling system isn’t doing its job. This is almost always caused by dust clogging the internal heatsink and fan. Over time, sustained high temperatures damage the processor, the graphics chip, and the motherboard — repairs that cost far more than a clean and thermal paste replacement.
7. A SMART Disk Warning Has Appeared
If you’ve seen a message at startup saying something like “A SMART error has been detected” or “Hard disk failure is imminent”, don’t dismiss it. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology — it’s a built-in early warning system that your hard drive uses to report on its own health. When it triggers a warning, it means the drive has detected something wrong internally. It might have weeks left, it might have days. Back up immediately and get the drive replaced before it takes your data with it.
8. The Battery Drains in Under an Hour (Laptops)
Laptop batteries degrade over time — that’s normal. But if a battery that used to last four or five hours is now lasting less than an hour, or if the laptop shuts down suddenly at 30% charge, the battery has deteriorated significantly. Beyond the inconvenience, a badly degraded lithium battery can swell inside the case, which puts physical pressure on other components and in rare cases poses a safety risk. A replacement battery is usually a straightforward and reasonably priced fix.
9. Random Blue Screens or Unexpected Restarts
A blue screen of death (BSOD) is Windows’ way of telling you something has gone seriously wrong — so wrong that it had to stop everything to prevent further damage. An occasional blue screen years apart isn’t necessarily alarming. Regular blue screens, or a computer that restarts itself without warning, absolutely is. The error codes that appear during a BSOD are specific and diagnostic; a technician can use them to pinpoint whether the problem is RAM, the hard drive, a driver conflict, overheating, or something else entirely.
What to Do When You Notice These Signs
The most important thing is not to ignore them and hope they resolve themselves. In almost every case, the underlying issue will get worse, not better — and a problem that costs £60 to fix today can become a £200 problem, or a lost-data problem, in a few weeks’ time.
If you’re seeing sign 3 or sign 7 specifically — the clicking noise or the SMART warning — back up your data right now, today, before you do anything else. Use an external hard drive, a USB stick, or a cloud service like OneDrive or Google Drive. Do it before bringing the machine in, not after.
For everything else, a proper health check will identify what’s causing the symptoms and give you a clear, costed plan for fixing it — with no obligation to proceed if the numbers don’t stack up.
The £35 PC Health Check at Mojoo
At Mojoo in West Bromwich, we offer a thorough PC and laptop health check for £35. It covers everything: hard drive health (including a full SMART test), RAM testing, thermal performance, fan and cooling system condition, startup times, virus and malware scan, and a full software audit. At the end, you get a plain-English report on what we found and what — if anything — needs doing, along with honest, fixed-price quotes for any work.
There’s no pressure to have any work done, and no hidden extras. If everything checks out fine, you’ll know your machine is in good shape. If something needs attention, you’ll know exactly what it is and what it will cost before we touch anything.
Call us on 07958 468 173 to book your health check, visit our computer repair page to learn more about our services, or get in touch online. We’re based at 4 Atlas Grove, West Bromwich, B70 9EB, and we see customers from across the West Midlands — Birmingham, Walsall, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Sandwell, and beyond.
