A Practical Approach To Shushing Your PC

An anonymous reader points to this wacky but effective-looking home-brewed answer to computer noise, consisting of a wooden case stuffed with ventilation shafts which follow a number of 180-degree turns, and implementing several ideas found at 12ghosts.de (in German). From the description on the site: "By traveling through the shafts, the noise is weakened gradually on its way through the sections. On the front the case has a door for accessing drives, the cables come out of a kind of "mouse hole" at the rear panel. A fan inside pulls an air flow through the wooden box."

Comments

Re:Watercooling

[Peter Clary]

The author indicates that one of his problems is the noise from hard drives, even after decoupling them from the case using rubber mounts. Water cooling isn't going to fix that. He was trying for a solution that addresses all sources of sound, and isn't affected by upgrading or replacing the computer.

Re:The risk of chasing the silent PC

[ballpoint]

I have suffered tinnitus in the past (and I still occasionally do) but I have found out I am able to make it go away completely using the following method:

- Imagine a very strong sound with the same frequency as the most disturbing component of your tinnitus. Concentrate. It's hard to explain, but you must keep on trying to generate this sound yourself in your head, like if you are singing or whistling but without actually doing it.

- After a short while (20-30 seconds) the tinnitus will disappear. It will come back after a while, but weaker. Repeat.

- After a few iterations the frequency you focused on will have gone completely, but you will notice other, weaker frequencies in your tinnitus. Do the same thing to them.

- Eventually you will end up with a tinnitus that is more noise like, instead of composed of pure tones. This is much more bearable, but you can still do better.

- Try to generate the same kind of noise. The noise will not be completely white, but will have 'texture'. Imagine it (think 'sssshhh'), fight back. The noise component too will rapidly fade.

You best do this at night in bed when it's really quiet.