My computer lately started to make the sound like it was turning off and on by itself, I could hear it clicking and winding up and down as if going throuhgh the shutdown and start up procedure. Only thing was that the images on the screen would only freeze temporarily and then unfreeze. But now its to the point were it stays frozen and I constantly have to restart the computer. What could the problem possibly be? I have done scandisk, spyware checks, virus checks withe three programs, defrags and adware checks and it hasnt made much difference.

What computer do you have? OS, hardware...

This almost sounds like an overheating problem or possibly a failing power supply.

Check and clean the fans and temporarily disconnect additional devices like a cdrom or even a floppy to ease the load on the power supply.

Make sure the cpu fna as well as the power supply fan are pushing air

A good cleanout might be in order, I feel. Make sure you disconnect the power cord before opening it up for a clean.

Well I have windows XP a 420 watt universal powersupply, a dragon soyo ultra motherboard, an amd athlon 2700, and a geforce 6800gt. my primary hardrive with my OS on it is a little old and my second hard drive is newer. the old one has the 2mb cache and the new has 8. I did an ubber thurough cleanning inside and out hardware and software and now in the past three days it has only frozen twice and hasnt made the clicking sound like its turning on and off. PLus I deleted a bunch of crap. Now the only thing is that during all the "repairs" it froze while doing a checkdisk and it even froze in safe mode once. But like i said its been good for three days with only two incidents so we'll see.

heres what you do. Un hook the PC, take off your case and touch the power supply. Make sure you touch the power supply. Then take a can of compressed air and spray that PC out. Remeber a cpu is the central processing unit, you mean PC. Spray out the PC. Dust etc will fall out. Place that beast back togther. Plug it up a boot up, and test it out. If that dont work update your power supply. Tigerdirect.com or newegg.com your choice.

i have a simular problem like that, I havn't tried cleaning the motherboard yet but i'll do that soon. The problem with my PC is, it freezes randomly. Mostly when I play one of my games. The problem started just last week. I had no trouble at all except for my cable IE, so I reformatted and cable was working fine. After I completed adding in all the hardware it started to freeze. The fan goes real fast for about 5 minutes then I freeze. It usually gives me about 1-4 hours before it freezes, but when i'm in the game, it gives me about half an hour max. Any suggestions?

when you say cable for IE im guessing you mean the internet. IE is internet explorer. It alone doe nothing and is just an application that allows you to view the webpages. Also i think your problem is both unclean mother board and over heating issues. When you say game i think everything running, and cd rom going causing heating issues. Maybe replace the fan, but also it could be a powersupply issue.

If your cpu fan fails your computer should shut off immediately...you might try changing out the fan as suggested before to make sure you have a good one..this would be an inexpensive fix and a good preventative measure if you have a failing fan...a blown processor is gonna cost you some bucks and it only takes a second or two of overheating to kill it!