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Back in the late 1970's and 1980's, powerful (ha!) microcomputers were incredibly noisy devices that would almost give you a headache if you spent any time using them.

One of the main problems were the rather crude and inefficient fans they used to try and keep the innards cool. In fact I recall that the Intertec Superbrain which graced my desk for a couple of years had a fan that blew hot air directly down and onto the desktop.

Not only was this fan irritatingly noisy but it would also turn any sheet of paper nearby into a little hovercraft that would quickly slide away at great speed and fall onto the floor. It was a nice machine to use on a cold winter's morning though.

The other main source of noise was the humble floppy drive.

When the new 5.25 inch floppy drives began to appear, quickly replacing the older 8 inch units, it became apparent that they were a whole lot noisier.

The situation was made worse when some manufacturers actually bolted these drives to the top of the thin metal case so that it acted as a sounding board.

So, as well as the continuous whoosh of the fan, there was the intermittent machine-gun-like rat-a-tat-a-tat of the heads in the floppy drives bouncing back and forth to put up with.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) Silent PCs... - Dylan Superbrain... - Paul Noise... - Rocjard Noise or not... - Peter noisy computers... - Nathan Have Your Say

But wait -- there's more!

Hands up all those who remember the good old dot-matrix printer?

One of the first printers I owned was a Citoh unit which used a solenoid to drive the paper feed. Boy, was it loud. Each time the paper advanced by a line, the solenoid would slam into its stop with a loud bang.

Performing a form-feed was inviting a major assault on your eardrums, prompting 70 or more rapid bangs to issue forth and causing the printer to shake violently back and forth on its little stand.

Then there were those awful Seagate 5M and 10MB full-height 5.25" hard drives that were as variable as the weather. If you were very lucky you'd get a quiet one that could barely be heard over the floppy drives, the fan, and the spastic printer. Unfortunately there were also "bad" ones which made a 747 on its take-off run sound like a mosquito by comparison.

So what has prompted me to take this little trip into the past?

Well as I was packing up the PC kindly loaned for the Tivo-like project by Advantage Computers I realised that the damned thing was virtually silent.

All the other PCs I have around here buzz or hum away, creating a tolerable level of background noise -- but the Advantage box is incredibly quiet, in fact the only way you know it's on is because the front panel lights are shining.

While I was polishing the final instalment of the Tivo-like PC project (better late than never) I had to go back and include a few paragraphs on the importance of selecting a "silent" PC for the task. Nothing would be more irritating than a box that constantly whined, hissed or buzzed while you were trying to watch your favourite programme.

Maybe PCs have come a long way in terms of speed, memory and storage -- but for my money, I'd have to rank the reduction in decibels right up there as one of the greatest advances of the past 20 years.

There's nothing worse than a computer that keeps you awake when you're trying to work eh?

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