3 day old laptop hdd making screeching noises

Unless it's a tablet it almost certainly has a CPU fan. It's not heard of to have spinning platter hard drives make high pitched scratching noises when doing heavy seeking on the disk. Does the sound happen more during periods of high disk activity?

Also, what hp model number? I'm getting lots of different model types when googling just hp 15.

Also, thumbs up for Xubuntu!

s/heard of/NOT unheard of/;
:P

>>243313

If you have a Bay Trail processor it doesn't need a fan, although it will likely die of overheating because HP seem to have forgotten how to design working cooling systems.

If you have just bought it, take it back to the shop and tell them to fix it under warranty. You really do not want to let this slide as it will bite you in the ass later if left.

>>243313
If it's going MEEEEMEEEEEMEEEEENEEEEMEEEEMEEEEEMEEE, that's a voltage regulator, the part that steps down the ~20V from your charger or battery to the 5V the laptop runs on.

Switch-mode VRs work by "chopping" the DC input signal into high-frequency AC, then running it through a transformer. They can squeak because a transformer on a PCB is a coil being fed AC attached to a big flat plate, just like a speaker is a coil being fed AC attached to a big flat plate. It takes skilled engineering work to make switchmodes not squeak, which is why Thinkpads and MacBooks don't squeak, and HPs and Dells do.

VRs squeak most when lightly loaded, so it will be squeaking less on Linux, where the power-management will make it fully-loaded more, and lightly-loaded less.

>>243313
This is what a PSU squeaking sounds like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itw0LKtwGjY