The Silent Office

[Labarum]

A few years ago I had two tower PCs with fanless heatsinks ons the CPU and video card. They were relatively quite and fast enough to run XP for surfing email and general office work.

Now I have a faster tower running XP or vista (dual boot) and a Shuttle - both are faster but relatively noisy.

If I consigned the tower to another room - it's stuffed full of hard drives, I could go back to utter silence in the study.

Fanless PCs are relatively expensive, the Macmini, I am told is quiet even for its fan, but there are various diskless and fanless linux boxes that might cheaply do what I want in utter silence and network to the tower PC hidden away.

I have even been looking at the Asus eeePC which, with an external monitor could be a good deal. Cheaper than *competitor*, and you can pick it up and walk with it.

What are the display resolutions with the eeePC, and can I display different things on the internal and external screen at the same time?

What other options are there?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

You should ask in the Eee PC thread.

 

[m_cozzy]

Run a thin client? Connecting back via rdp to your main machine in another room. Absolutely fine for office type apps. Thats what I have downstairs.

However maybe you could also quieten your main pc? My recent build is very quiet, mainly I think due to the antec case that has silicon mounts for the 5 drives and tri-cool fans.

Edit: The sun thin client I use has no moving parts & is absolutely silent. I get annoyed when the sky+ box turns on & starts whirring & that is a good 10 feet away.

 

[Hamish]

Any mac will be just about silent, I have a MacBook pro and macmini and friends have MacBooks and iMacs, they are totally silent unless you put your ear to them.

As for PCs i'm in the same boat as you being fed up of noisy PCs, having a totally silent PCs although nice will cost shedloads, however a very quiet PC costs only slightly more than a normal one. Get the energy efficient edition processors, a large heatsink and a 7v 120mm fan next to it, put your hard drive in an enclosure, buy a case with foam padding, run 1 7v'd 120mm case fan and you will struggle to hear your PC even in a quiet room.