Reduce Fan Humming And Other Computer Sounds

I like my work environment to be as silent as possible. So I bought a PC components with "silence" in my mind.

I got a Chieftec "silence reducing box". All good stuff in there. But i keep hearing the fan.

The fan does not make continues sound but kind of electronic hums.

Also I hear the hard disk working like crazy when I'm just browsing pages.

How can I reduce the ambient sound of my system?

Answer

There are a couple of things I do when computer noise is too much for me.

1. Take the large fan that is mounted in the front of the case and move it to the back of the case. If you have 2 fans. You may want to try and remove the front 1, and see if your system temperatures run fine with just 1 fan, most of the time, this is not a problem at all.

2. Go into your BIOS settings and look for a setting, with the help of the manual that came with your motherboard, that lets the motherboard slow down the speed of your fans when the cooling is not needed. This can make a huge difference, especially if you have a nice cooler on your CPU.

3. To eliminate hard drive noise, this is a bit trickier. First make sure indexing on your drives is disabled. This is done by right clicking on any drive, then disable the indexing check box. Don't worry, I have yet to see any performance decrease at all by doing this. Also, check to see how much RAM you are using. CTRL+ALT+Delete, then select task manager will get you there. When the screen pops up displaying how much RAM your system has in use, if it is over 75-80% when you are doing common tasks, it's a good idea to add RAM to reduce the amount of time Windows is paging files to your drive because you are low on RAM.

Last, if the hard drive clicking noise is just too much for you, you can buy a solid state drive, as they have no moving parts. They make no noise. Just a little word of warning, they are pricey, and only support a limited number of read and writes. The technology is also new, which means they are still bugs to be fixed. If you choose this option, make sure you also disable the Windows pagefile on this drive, as it really will shorten the lifespan.