Dad’s Silent PC

Before I start on evil calculus, let me tell you about a project.

In the Easter Holidays, it was decided that dad had finally old 466Mhz Celteron PC with 192mb RAM (previously 64mb). It orginally came with Windows 98, then ran XP and Office quite well considering.

But with the amount of spam going up and up, Outlook was no longer good enough so he switched to Thunderbird. And he uses Firefox to surf - both RAM hogs. He also now uses fast user switching with mum's account.

On top of that the .net framework runs Visual Liturgy, a resource-hogging monster of a program. And now he needs VNC for remote assistance as I'm not there to fix things. Oh, and DynDNS too.

And the fans and hard drives all whined away.

Cue: Upgrade

I decided to give my old PC to my brother, and took his old Medion 800Mhz 256mb RAM away.
This machine was a noisy beast in it's own right, but had one of the first Seagate 20gb Ultra quiet models. I removed the AGP graphics card with its tiny noisy fan and replaced it with an old Creative Banshee 16MB that had passive cooling. (Thanks Nancy for that)

The 300W PSU was quiet too, but the CPU fan needed fixing.

From a cool London company called Yoyotech I ordered a Zalman Athlon/Duron cooler upto 2Ghz which is a huge copper heatsink with a full 80mm fan on top, and a speed adjuster. It came to less than £20 Since this is way overspecced for dads PC, I put it on the lowest setting. And its so quiet you cant tell the PC is on

Posted 21st May 2007 in Life, with 3 comments