Slashdot Mirror
Quiet Desk (Not Desktop) PC
Anonymous Coward writes "Rusty took a wholly different approach to PC noise: he built his XP1900+ machine right into the desk! While it may not make the PC industry scramble to define a new *desk* (not desktop) form factor, Rusty's inventive techniques will surely have computer hardware enthusiasts poring over his fine work."
Bit of a problem upgrading 'Desks'. Also, LAN parties will be a bit of a bitch. Gotta get the trusty U-haul trucks.
I can't think of any sites with specific examples, but it seems like I've seen this before... along with computer built into walls and other such things. Now... if it was a LEGO desk with a computer built into it, I'd be impressed.
Darn, could not see the fine work. Slashdotted early. So, should he engrave a big /. in the middle of the desk now?
Kinda reminds me of this, eh?
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Doesn't that make it kinda hard to take to LAN parties? I'd hate to miss out on a good Quake session because I couldn't get my computer into my car.
"No manual entry for woman."
And for the first time in history a table is Slashdotted!
"Unlike most of you, I am not a nut." - Homer J. Simpson
My own personal MCP at my fingertips!
I love this website... it's my #1 source of cool things I'd love to look at, if only the computer hosting them wasn't a smouldering puddle of melted plastic and silicon.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Great.....So now we've got "Anonymous Cowards" hyping the first article on their website...
/home/www/silentpcreview.com/pnadodb/drivers/adodb -mysql.inc.php on line 121
/home/www/silentpcreview.com/pnadodb/drivers/adodb -mysql.inc.php on line 121
Unfortunately, our Anonymous Friend didnt anticipate the strain on the servers...
Warning: Too many connections in
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
mysql://silentpc:@localhost/silentpcreview failed to connectToo many connections
Ahhh.....Like poetry....
Where's the stress relief when the damn thing Blue Screens?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I dunno if building a PC into a desk is all that original. I've seen a few in my time which were pretty inventive. This, on the other hand, seems quite an improvement, at least it's got Hot Java. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Who would want to work on such a hot, shaky piece of wood?
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
A four alarm fire has broken out in Everett, WA. Officials believe the cause to be a overheated server creating a desk to combust.
Registrant:
Internal Combustion
2815 107th Pl SE
Everett, WA 98208
US
Domain Name: SILENTPCREVIEW.COM
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Now, the next level of this will be redundency. Walk into someone's office, and see two identical desks, with idendical pen holders, family photos, telephones and whatnot on the surface.
"What's that one for?" a casual observer might ask.
"Oh, that's just my backup desk, for when my main one crashes."
I've been thinking about this for about 3 years now, just haven't had the time to do it.
Powerswitches for components and lights along front edge, verical drawer for motherboard. Exentions of usb/audio/ps2/etc. ports to a panel on the top of the desk. Backlit round panel with a spoke jutting up for a cd spindle. "popup" removable media drives on the top surface (lift a hinged panel with the drive attached to the underside to insert disk).
I wish I could see what this guy did to compare to my thoughts.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
My dads been doing this for 30 years. To change his hard drive he pulls out a drawer and puts in a new one. He started it while working for McDonald Douglas a few years before I was born. I still remember sticking 5" floppies into the slot opening in the bottom drawer. I would kick my feet while playing this wierd cow game he had and every couple minutes would kick the lever releasing the floppy and crashing the system.
To him it makes perfect sense. He can expand more easily without opening cases and it solves some heat issues you get in tiny enclosures. Not to mention its totally silent.
www.wworld.com/users/seancrago/CaseUnAssembledRigh t.jpgp g
/.ed, you won't be missing much if you get a couple of pics. Only really novel thing explained in the text of the article was where he explained that the CPU was a down-volted xp1900, w/passive cooling.
www.wworld.com/users/seancrago/CaseOpen1.j
Those mirrors won't last long, but they're the most impressive of the pics in the article. Even if the site stays
This.
:)
Sadly, it's been discontinued, which is why you'll only find it in Google's cache.
Cool idea though.
On a lighter note, you could now have water cooling linked to a nice decorative fish tank - hell you don't even need real fish
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
"Let's see, have to do some work now. Hey, is it hot in here or is it just me? Wow, my desk is getting hot! Hey, what gives?" [phoom!]* "oh, the humanity!!!!"
*phoom = sound wooden desk makes when it bursts into flames
Hey, maybe next they will build a PC that fills an entire room and doubles as a central heating system. Oh... wait...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Dammit. Yet another cool site I'd love to see, but predictably slashdotted into the depths of hell.
Sheesh. How hard is this? Quietly prepare a mirror of the site. Post the story. When their poor little server goes screaming into the abyss, shoot them an email that says, "Hi. Sorry we depthcharged your site. Would you like us to point our link to a mirror?" They say "Hell, yes."
Problem solved. Well, OK, maybe warning them in advance would work better.
Admittedly, I am far from the sharpest crayon in the box, and yes, this adds a layer of administration and screwups, but how is that any worse than the subject of almost every single story being unavailable?
We're supposed to be a bunch of smart geeks here. Slashdotting sites into the next millenium is a technical problem. Why can't we fix this?
And no, dammit, this is not off-topic.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
USER: Wow, this thing is cool. Hey, where'd my notepad go?
FRIEND: It's over there on your desktop.
USER: Huh? No it's not. I've looked all over. Not there.
FRIEND: No. It's on your DESKTOP.
USER: *Dawn of realization* Ohhhh.......
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Use your brain, if /. hosts the mirror locally, then the number of people access their site isn't going to go up. The total bandwidth might go up a little bit due to more images, but in the end it would have a minimal effect on them. It's not going to magically draw more users from the void to hit /.
What?
...about the desk bursting into flames, people, and why all the "insightful" mods that go along with it?
There's a few pictures mirrored in the posts. If you go look at them you'll see that he has a Zalman heatsink, and a ducted case fan blowing right on it.
Lessee. Last I checked, copper had a favorable heat transfer coeffecient. Fins are a valid way of transmitting heat to air, too.
Passively, a Zalman Flower Heatsink might not stand up to an Athlon XP 1900+, but even with a modicum of air flow, it'll do fine.
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
I'm newly in the Real World, so I needed my own desk. My computer was also way too loud, and I'm cheap, so I made a box to put the computer in and turned it into a desk.
:( Plus, I have to open up the side of the case to turn the fan on and off. Anyone know a good way to get the fan to turn on and off when the computer's on and off? At least it still works well as a desk.
I made a wooden box that's made of particle board and painted fire engine red (cheap paint). It has a hinge and a door in the front. Inside is carpet padding and a computer. I took some more red particle board and made another stand of the same height. I bought a door from Home Depot, stained it, and laid it across the two.
It works great, except that the computer gets too hot. I thought I had planned for that appropriately, but apparently you need more air flow than I could create. So I cut out an interior floor of the box and installed a rectangular house fan. That works great, except it's now too loud again
So, don't do like me. Make your case plenty wide/tall/deep, with lots of air flow and baffles everywhere.
To the Editors:
(read this, it's important)
I WOULD PAY MONEY to have access to a subscribers-only cache of stories.
Period.
Money,
out of my pocket.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Quiet Desk (Not Desktop) PC
Posted by michael on 12:58 PM October 16th, 2002
You know, it's not night *everywhere* on the planet...
One of the first nearly-personal computers, the IBM System 3, model 6, which booted up into a Basic (or RPG II), console was built like a desk. This thing came out in the spring of 1971. It had 16k of real memory, 48k of virtual memory, mountable disks, optional VDT, builtin 100 CPS dot-matrix printer right in the middle of the desk, card reader, card punch, and as much free desktop space as most computer geeks have today, etc.
Actually no, all the cables have enough extra length looped into them at the end to allow the drawer to open fully. Trust me, it's my computer. (in fact i'm typing on it right now) But thank god that silentpcreview isn't my site, and that my machine isn't the server! If anybody has any specific questions I can try to answer them, since at the moment you can't actually see the site.
For example, the Noval 760, a Z-80 system with monitor, tape drive, and printer, built into a desk. The peripherals are in a hinged portion so they can be kept out of the way when you're not computing. The Noval was reviewed in Byte magazine in 1977.
Could this be the first PC which actually *does* have a cup holder?
I am a Karma Library.
The 68K series design, however, was capable of handling a 4Gig address space. The only reason why the 68000 was limited to a 16meg address space was that only 24 of the possible 32 address bits were brought out to the bus. (there was actually a 68012 which was little more than a specialty 68000 with all 32 address pins available).
When the Mac II originally came out, it ran on the 68020 which made it the first general-availability 68K system with a 32bit address space.
Unfortunately, the biggest general-availability memory chips were a whopping 1megabit. This meant that a 2Gigabyte memory module would require 16000 1meg chips. (and that's presuming no parity or ECC!) I did some back-of-the-envelope design work, and concluded that the best design for a 2GB MacII memory module would be to camoflage it as a desk. The top of the desk would hold the memory cards and there would be two pillars. One would be a cooling unit, the other would be the 16KiloWatt power supply. (now you know why I needed a cooling pillar)
I called my (theoretical) creation the MemDesk. Never could find an investor to pay for the development, though.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
A good rule I've learned with delicate electronics, through the actions of others while in high school. Always place the computer higher up than the drink is placed. That way, if the drink spills, it won't trickle down into the computer.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Go grab this file.
Unzip, preserving folder names, and enjoy.
Jouster