Macbook not booting, faint ticking noise?

Question

Hi there, I'm hoping you guys can give me a few pointers here. I have a mid 2007 black 13" Macbook that I have been having problems with. There have been two previous issues which may or may not be related.
Over the last three years, this Macbook has eaten through five HDD's. After finally getting fed up of this, I wondered if perhaps somehow I was to blame, maybe without realising I was putting it down on the desk a bit too hard or something, so when the most recent failure came, (approx six months ago) I bit the bullet and bought myself an SSD and all now seems to be well on the storage front.
Around the same time as the first HDD failure, came random shutdowns, without warning, what appeared to be complete power failures. I also noticed the X symbok in the battery indicator. These initially were fairly frequent but eventually subsided, along with the X symbol, but always seemed to rear up again, in times a heavy use, and were more often than not followed by HDD failure.
Now, the current issue is that yesterday, I started experiencing these power failures again, hoping to myself, I turned the machine back on. Upon logging in, the fan spun up to max, so, checking activity monitor, I found that spotlight indexing, was taking up 148%CPU and this seemed to be the cause of the shutdowns.
I left the machine to cool down for a few hours, booted it up, let spotlight finish indexing, and all was well for about 3 hours. Then came another shutdown.
This time, there was a reluctance to boot. The DVD drive made its usual noise, the sleep light glowed on, and then everything died. I tried again, same result, I tried a third time, and was greeted with the all to familiar, 'no boot media' icon (Folder with ?? flashing). Frustrated at the possible death of my SSD I turned the machine off and let it be.
Later on, I gave it one last try, hoping beyonnd hope, and lo and behold, it booted with no problem. When I logged in, I noticed the 'X' in the battery indicator once more, and spotlight started indexing again, fearing this would cause more shutdowns, I temporarily disabled indexing via terminal. All was well for a couple of hours, I turned my machine off, and went to bed.
I came down this morning, tried to turn on my Macbook, nothing. Tried again, still nothing. magsafe is plugged in w/ green light, battery shows full charge with or without magsafe plugged in, then I heard a faint ticking noise from the machine, on the logic board somewhere while the power button was pressed. it's somewhere around the 'W' on the keyboard. I have read that it could possibly be a shorted inductor on the logic board. Is there any chance it could be something a little more replaceable?
I'm hoping against hope here, as if it is the logic board, it may be time to retire the old beasty.
Cheers in anticipation,
A

Answer 1

I was indeed looking into getting a mainboard for my old MacBook. I found a place where I was told, they will order it and replace it for me... the 'piece' never came to its destination ... after being almost 4months without computer, I decided to make the plunge and got a new one. After thinking, even if you found a 'reclaimed one' it may solve your problem just temporarly. If I were you, I would rather make a downpayment and get a financing on a new machine - you will be good to go for at least 6 or 7years again (with the new technology). Now, if you do not want to 'loose your money' you may wanna consider to resell your Device after a 1y1/2 or 2year, which permits you to get money back and stay 'in' the iDevices.