If the speakers are disconnected, and there's no disks in his floppy/cd-rom drives, then the only thing that can click when powering down would be the hard drive, in which case, it can't be cured by reformatting and reinstalling anything... Is it a very polite, mild-manner clicking sound (like whispering the word "chuck chuck chuck..."), or is it a series of blantant, ill-mannered clunks and knocks?

If it's a whispering chuck, then it's probably developing bad sectors that may or may not be cured by scandisk. If it clunks or knocks, then your brother-in-law can either fire his hard drive before it fires him, or his hard drive will fire him before he fires it - it's a simple case with only two possible outcome...:eek:

I just got one in for repair. Man, that was the worst machine I have ever worked on what a pain. The one I recieved for repair has a high-pitch power supply whine and clicks every now and then. E-machines put cheap power supplys in their computers. Try puting in a better power supply. I believe the Emonster500 has a 145 watt Power supply (don't quote me on that I'm not positive).

You mean to tell me that (1) the machine is powered down, and (2) the hard disk activity light blinks on its own - while all the other indicator lights are out? We're in X-File territory now... Anybody? I feel compelled to buy this machine from your brother-in-law just to figure out...

Talk about weird, I once had Pentium 75 desktop with a hard drive running dos 6 and windows 3.11 (workgroup), which I fdisk'd, format'd, and put 95 on it - darn thing went thru the install without a hitch, restarted, and ran 95. Okay, so I started loading software (novell, plus some custom stuff that I C++'d) and then I'm done and turned it off and went home. The next morning I came back, turned the machine on, and guess what? I was staring at dos 6 and windows 3.11. I then fdisk'd and format'd and loaded 98 and the same thing happened - Long Live dos 6 and windows 3.11! This was my server, you see, so I stuck with dos 6 and windows 3.11 and it "served" without a hitch until I retired it years later to my garage. A year ago I took it out, repeated what I did five years ago, and got the exact same results. So back to the garage it went. I'm gonna give it another go five years from now - I know it'll do the exact same thing! Excellent entertainment value! :-|