Odd sound during network activity
 

Hey,
Whenever I browse pages with Firefox (1.0.6) on Slackware 10.1, something inside the computer makes an odd grating noise, almost like the CPU is at 100% usage. It could be the hard drive, but most likely it is something with the ethernet cable, network card, etc.
However, these sounds don't happen in the Windows XP partition on the same computer (and same hard drive).
Any ideas why this would be happening? Maybe some option I set for the network or hard drive (like dma?).
Thanks, the noise is a little grating during high network use.

Do you see signs of hard disk activity (hard disk light, etc)? Have you run gkrellm during this and watched the hard disk graph?

You don't hapen to have the NoScript extension for Firefox installed do you?
If you do goto options and turn off audio notification.

Hmm, not it isn't the NoScript extension. And I did now look at the gkrellm graph as I open up a page, the disk spikes up and so does the CPU (to around 25-50%, it was really varying).
So maybe it is a hard drive noise. I don't see why there would need to be disk activity, unless it is caching a page I haven't been to or loading from the cache? The weird part is even closing tabs seems to make this same noise, even though there is no disk activity for that (around 6-10% CPU though).
I'll maybe try another browser and see how that goes.

One more thing to note, I am normally listening to streaming music (128k/s), and have Gaim open while doing browsing, but this shouldn't have any affect?

Check other browsers. Also, how are your CPU temperatures? Try this from the console: "dd if=/dev/zero of=SOMEFILE bs=10k count=200" and see if the noise is heard. This will bring light to disk issues.