What is that "Beep"?

Hello all. I've got this old laptop that I am using 'till it won't work anymore, which will hopefully be a while from now. Here's my symptom:

Every so often, there is a 'beep' form somewhere, my guess is that it's coming from the speakers, but I'm not quite sure. It is a strange beep, and it seems that the disk starts chomping when it occurs. I've checked my system performance, and there is a system idle process that is making the processor go from 70% to 99%, off and on. I'm running XP on a pentIII 700 mhz, with 512 ram.

Anyone have a guess as to what's going on, or how I can look into this crazy situation? Thanks, Buford

Beep Error Codes: See if the beep sound corresponds to one of these.

The beep is about a second long. The beep happens once a session or something like that. The CPU usage goes up to 100% once every ten or twenty seconds. In System tools, I'm getting lots of errors in System - 7000 and 7009, once every twenty seconds or so. Something isn't right here...

Event id 7000 is some service or other failing to start & 7009 generally comes with it .. which pretty much means anything at all could be wrong .. can you give us the full texts of the errors, which might maybe at least yield a service.

Btw 'system idle' is whats left free of your cpu, its like the idler gear in a gear box for a mechanical comparison, allows the cpu to tick over- if CPU usage is going up, something else is using it, this doesn't count, its like the balancing figure to create 100% usage...

What are you doing when it beeps ?