Quote Originally Posted by Watchman
The disk drives are behaving themselves - the CD drive had a strange habit of occasionally spontaneously starting to spin really fast without doing anything until you opened and closed it, but it stopped that some time ago.
That's really strange. Sounds very familiar, but I don't know what else to say about it. If it's gone now, I guess it's okay (for the time being).

While the BIOS certainly might not be the newest, I'd prefer to leave it alone if possible (the *last* time I tried upgrading one, I had to get a whole new MB... ) and it'd be rather odd for it to only start acting up now and not earlier.
Hmm, I'd still upgrade it just in case, but if you think it's risky due to the last time, then that's understandable. Maybe you could check out information on the web about your board and BIOS and such, just to get a peek at it at least.