Does it sound like hard drive noises? If not then no it's probably just a dirty fan. If it is your hard drive then it's dying.
Walmart sucked. They ended up only having the Linksys router I already have and a few others. I ended up getting the Belkin Wireless G Plus Mimo router. If it doesn't work out I can always take it back though. On the plus side, setting the NAT to open actually worked like it was supposed to for XBL. I guess I will test a game online now.
Well yeah it's a Belkin, Belkin and Netgear are the top dogs when it comes to routers/networking.
I should clarify that at no time did my computer make a ticking noise.
Tweak them as in installing a custom firmware on them or something
I don't do that anyway.
Just got done with 2 games. The first one was mildly laggy, but a bit more than usual. The second game was just shit. I don't know what the hell was going on. My shields would just start draining when I wasn't being shot. A couple of time the screen went black and I ended up respawning as if I had died. It may have just been a bad host or something. I am about to try it out a little more.
Try sustaining a connection both uploading and downloading. Probably using bittorrent, or just a multiplayer PC game. Warsow has extremely low requirements so give it a shot
http://www.warsow.net/?page=home
If it screws up while playing that game, then try connecting the modem directly and playing.