I sure hope SPCR does some ultra-low-end system designs in the future. Look, there are plenty of low-end systems on the SPCR galleries. What you are describing is NOT ultra-low-end. Ultra-low-end would use a low end processor and would have at most 512megs of RAM. You seem to have decided that fanl...

When it comes to budget computing, the components choose you more than you choose the components. You use whatever you can get cheap, restricted to brands you generally trust. I like using newegg's "power search" feature. In this case, we'll want to look at Intel motherboards with Intel graphics bui...

It's really quite simple. He wishes they still made hard drives that small.

Why doesn't he just buy a bunch of 150gig Raptors? Presumably because that's expensive. He probably thinks that if the drives were smaller, then they'd be less expensive (while not necessarily being slower).

I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games. RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore.. @Nick, you have to assume he meant 8GB SSDs, nobody makes FAST 8GB drives. You did ...

It's certainly possible to put together a low end silent system together for under $350. All of my computers cost less than that.

However, I wouldn't call 3Ghz "low end".

For your purposes I'd go with your original idea of installing to a flash drive. The main problem with netbooting is that the computer is essentially dependent on another particular computer being functional. I think this is acceptable for a workstation or media player "appliance", but I don't like ...

Yes, I think so. However, netbooting is significantly more complex. With Debian 4.0, I notice that the first time it attempts to mount the nfs root, it fails. So it will be necessary to a little more complex hacking of the nfs root mounting script to do the ramdisk creation/copy. The little hack I s...

The machine I'm currently typing on is a Socket 754 Sempron 3100+ with 384megs of RAM. It's...a tight fit. I'm going to continue to do more trimming and will be using this on my main workstation--which has 1meg of RAM. Even if I had tons of RAM, I'd still do the trimming because the size of the imag...

That is a lot of fans, there! I'm amazed you can even hear the difference, with that one extra fan. To reduce the vibration, you can first try manually lifting the fan a little bit so it doesn't contact anything but your hand. This will confirm that the vibration problem is due to vibration transmis...

On my main workstation, I've gone from diskless netbooting to this RAMboot method. It boots off a hard drive, loads the entire OS into RAM, and spins down the hard drive. Now I can finally enjoy true silent computing! Previously, I had used either an enclosed 2.5" drive or I use diskless booting ove...

[edit: I've created a new and improved how-to. The original version is included below the new version, but there's no reason to prefer the old one.] ----------------------------- How to RAMboot This details a method of loading your entire OS into an uncompressed ramdisk. The result is lightning fast...

Nice, elegant cabling job. I particularly like how you tucked the mobo power cable underneath the video card.

It's a pity that the hard drive is hardmounted, but that's a sensible choice for a LAN party machine.

The hard drive suspension system you use is almost identical to mine (I use plastic juice bottles, and wrap it with bubble wrap). The critical difference, though, is that I purposefully leave both sides open for airflow. On my file server, I have two hard drives and mount an undervolted 80mm fan to ...

No system with 8+ hard drives is going to be silent. It can be in the special case where those 8+ hard drives are media storage and spend most of their time parked. In this special case, the only time a hard drive is spun up is while watching a video or playing a game; during this time the noise of...

Oh dear. Forget that monstrous Skeleton, the Mini-Skeleton is adorable! Who wants a cat when you can have a kitten?

I'd like it if it were black.

Reencoding videos is the key to play them smoothly on slower computers. Up until a couple months ago, my only laptop was a 400mhz Pentium M Compaq with 192megs of RAM. I used mencoder to reencode videos to play smoothly (on trips, my more powerful desktop computers are unavailable). Here's my script...

I disagree. At this point, anyone using such an old computer is probably a hobbyist who likes "resurrecting" old hardware. I'm running full blown Debian 4.0 on my cute old Toshiba Libretto 70CT (Pentium 120mhz, 32megs of RAM).

For me, the real question is what am I NOT going to put in it? Namely, a big honking array of Raptors. Currently, my main workstations are diskless, and netboot off of a 100mbit LAN because I'm cheap. But given the funds, I'd gladly trade up to gigabit hardware and put a bunch of Raptors on the file...

Here's another vote against RAID1. You can trivially cut down the noise and power by using two independent drives--one as the "live" drive and the other as a "backup" drive which spends most of the time parked. You use rsync or some other backup utility to periodically backup from the "live" drive t...

I am using 600 Mhz Slot A AMD Athlon with 128 MB PC-100 for one 800 Mhz Thunderbird with 256 mb PC-133 for second and now I am experimenting Fluxbuntu with my 700 Celeron laptop with 512mb PC-100 So-Dimm. With 128+ megs of RAM, you do not need to use a limited lightweight distribution like Damn Sma...

I would prefer complete silence, but I find that no matter what, there is a certain screechy electronics bzzz on any sort of I/O (whether hard drive or network access). Years ago, I had assumed that this screechy noise was due to my imperfect homebrew laptop drive enclosure. However, I noticed the e...

What do you mean by a linux target? Does that mean you're using it to boot up a Linux operating system? If so, then it really isn't necessary to have that. I'm netbooting Debian GNU/Linux using plain old PXE/tftp/nfs. The reason I'm not getting as good performance as you is that I'm using cheap old ...

For what it's worth, I bit the bullet and figured out how to do diskless netbooting. I wrote a how-to on doing it with Debian. It does involve a noticeable performance hit, with plain old 100mbit ethernet--about the same speed as an average laptop drive (around 10megs per second). However, it's chea...

While I've never migrated a Windows install to a flash drive, I've used the "dd" method to clone from one hard drive to another: http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134457 I use section "B", which is a generic way to clone the whole shebang. I've used it to clone over multi-partition multi-b...

Nobody here keeps their computer quiet at the risk of longevity. I do. I do it all the time, largely because most of my computer hardware is old "junk" anyway. I've killed plenty of hardware, although I really don't know how much of it was due to heat. For example, I think one of the old 2.5" drive...

The Antec 900 is a big brute. Maybe it looks smaller in pictures due to its excessively large top fan.

That is indeed ugly, although not nearly as ugly as at first. I don't think there's any problem with routing GPU heatsink air to the PSU. When is the GPU heatsink ever going to heat up? Probably only when you're gaming, at which point background music and sound effects may distract you from any PSU ...

I went diskless for most of my workstations a while ago; I even wrote up a how-to on how to do it with Debian. My file server is the only one with active hard drives; the other machines boot off the network (I have backup hard drives in some of the "diskless" workstations, but they are used strictly...

Due to word wrap, I read the title as:

"Thanks to the members of this forum, my HTPC is dead"



But just be warned--homebrew modifications CAN potentially kill your computer! I've killed quite a lot of spare computer equipment with foolhardy experiments pushing beyond the line...