Is this normal?

Click and listen.. my laptop PC is making those noises all the time...it wasnt doing that before,, and the laptop i had before this one, never did that. it's not on mic either..

Could there be something wrong or have i not set the volume controls (for audio recording purposes) correctly?

I didn't heard anything...

There's like a faint static-like background noise.. i can hear it quite clearly on my laptop...but here is the same file amplified. not that it's much of a big deal or anything..but i hadn't noticed it before...just curious.

Can hear it clearly.

If I don't have my headphones on, and that is hardly ever, I can hear a similar noise coming from the small speakers on my TFT LCD monitor.

I've just plugged my headphones into the jack on the monitor, and with the volume up a bit, I can clearly hear an intermittent beep at approximately 1 second intervals.

Always use the headphone socket on the PC tower itself to avoid this.

Hope this helps.

If I don't have my headphones on, and that is hardly ever, I can hear a similar noise coming from the small speakers on my TFT LCD monitor.

It sounds like speaker noise from an amplifier to me, then again it could be something else. However I can produce a similar sound on my desktop PC via the speakers just by turning them up, then again I can do the same on my home stereo.

To make sure it isn't just speaker noise you can play around with the Windows Play Volume via Start->Run->sndvol32.exe

Make sure your volume levels aren't either maxed out especially on the Microphone volume as they're rather sensitive, or disable the Microphone volume by muting it when not using a Microphone.