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Silent Machine

 Eliminate the sound of fans / disks.
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Several approaches would work. The fans are present to remove heat. Thus, they could be replaced with a massive heat-sink (perhaps the size of the machine itself), that is connected to each chip with a cable crafted of a thermally- conductive material. The sound of the hard-disk would be eliminated by replacing the HDD entirely with non-volatile memory (at mind-numbing expense.)
—dsm, Dec 28 2000

Power Mac G4 Cube http://www.apple.com/powermaccube/
Look - no fan! And it looks cool. [hippo, Dec 28 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

QuietPC.com http://www.quietpc.com/
A plethora of sound-reducing devices. [egnor, Dec 28 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

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       Too bad that Power Mac G4 Cube is, you know, a Mac. :?) (Back in RollsRoyce's auto heyday, it was rumored their engines were so good, they were permanently sealed.)
—Ander, Dec 28 2000
   

       The retail desktop pcs that I see today compare favorably with their predecessors. The performance comparison for these same periods is, well, forgetaboutit. I think that what has evolved in personal photography is a similar improvement in noise and lessened mechanical vibration. Who can say if or when smart chip technology will make the gold plated plug anachronism?
—reensure, Dec 29 2000
   

       QuietPC.com (see link) offers a number of silencing products, including sound-muffling disk drive enclosures, quiet fans, and so on.   

       In my experience, by far the best way to eliminate computer noise is to relocate the computer. Put the CPU box (with its noisy fans, hard drives, and whatnot) in a closet somewhere, and use a KVM extender to connect your keyboard, video and mouse at your desk.   

       Commercially available KVM extenders can carry keyboard, high resolution video, mouse, audio, and USB signals over ordinary cat-5 cabling for hundreds of feet. (You'd be running network cables to your computer anyway!) They cost a few hundred bucks, but that's less than it would cost to replace your hard disk with NVRAM!   

       An advantage is that your CPU can now be administered centrally, which is a boon for workplace IT departments. A disadvantage is that you have to walk into a different (and very noisy) room to switch CD's. It's possible that using a USB extender and a USB CD-ROM would avoid this problem, but then you still have the noise from your CD-ROM drive.
—egnor, Dec 29 2000
   

       Just have all the PCs nicely rack-mounted with a robotic arm system for loading CDs/floppies/tapes. Or, you could have a large CD tower with the most used CDs that everyone can access. Getting CPUs out of the cubes sure would save on space. At one job I had 4 CPUs (linux, win95, nt4 and win98beta) connected to a KVM switch. Those boxen took up a lot of desk real-estate.
—megalodon, Jun 28 2001
   

       Noise-cancelling technology, maybe?
—andrewm, Mar 11 2003
   


 

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