Acer Aspire 5552 odd clicking sound.

Hi, I'm using an Acer Aspire 5552.

For a little while now my laptop has made an odd noise. The best way I can describe this is that usually, when your laptop is working the hard drive makes little noises which is only natural but about 5 minutes into start-up mine makes a noise slightly odder than usual, a sort of on and off rapid clicking sound that lasts for about 5 minutes or so but during this clicking everything freezes, everything just messes up. This was only the beginning.

The other day I installed a few Windows updates to see if that would sort the problem out, I had turned automatic updating off ages ago and I had to install about 17 "important" updates. So after doing this, instead of my laptop freezing up 5 minutes after start up it now simply makes the weird rapid clicking noise about 20 minutes into start up but doesn't stop and during this time a process will freeze every 10 seconds for about 2 seconds.

Any ideas on what this could be? This is has been going on for ages now. If it helps, I've had the laptop since March 29th 2011 to present, so it is not that old and I myself highly doubt it is hard drive failure.