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This is not yet another article about how to use expensive components such as fanless PSUs, copper heatsinks or water cooling to turn down the noise level produced by your PC. Mac users can stop reading here since their computers do not make that much noise.

Standard PCs have at least 3 fans. One for PSU, one for CPU and one for graphics card. Sometimes They also have additional fan for chipset as well as one for improving air intake and perhaps one for cooling your HDDs or PCI cards.

What we need is to cut down noise without affecting the cooling effectiveness so we won't remove any fans. You can start by replacing noisy fans with quiter ones if you want since that is not expensive but it is a hassle because you must open the case, find the adequate replacement and perform the change yourself. My solution however does not require you to open the case and it costs ~130 USD. The only thing you need to have is a small room, corridor or closet near your workplace.

Yes, thats right. We are going to move the computer to another room! It is the most obvious solution but it is rarely used because there are certain problems associated with it. Here is how I did it.

First thing you need to obtain is monitor extension cable. It should be a good quality one with RF filters on both ends. I found that the 5m cable was long enough for me and later determined that it does not affect the image quality.

After you get the monitor cable you need to handle the problem with your input devices. If you have cordless desktop and it has range that suits your needs, good for you, but I prefer not having to deal with batteries and chargers. If you are like me (and that means keen on adopting new and useful technologies) chances are that you already have USB mouse and keyboard. No cordless desktop? No USB? Time to get some and it is your choice -- both will work just fine but with USB you won't have to ponder whether you have charged your batteries recently or not.

So my advice is to go for the USB if you don't already have it or if you don't already have cordless desktop.

I have bought 5m of USB 2.0 cable and a self powered USB hub with 4 ports. I have connected mouse and the keyboard to the hub and I only have two wires from the case to the workplace. Now hang on a minute! What do I do when I need to insert a CD? It is easy, you just get one USB to IDE adapter, mount your CD/DVD drive inside, connect it to the hub, put it on your desk and it is accessible again!

There is even one USB port left free and you can use it to plug digital camera, USB flash disk or your mp3 player. And it is all easily accessible right in front of you on your desk. You could also get a hub with 6 or 8 ports so you can attach your printer and scanner too but IMHO you should not put them near the workplace because your feet really need activity sometimes.

If you experience problems with your USB devices after setting everything up, be sure to install this update from Microsoft. And if it happens to you that your mouse won't power up after resuming from S3 suspend state then disable power management for the USB port to which the hub is connected.

Bear in mind that your cables should not exceed 5m (in other words it is possible to have greater lengths of up to 30m but only if you put one self-powered hub at every 5m mark (up to 5 hubs total plus 5m for the device cable itself). This is highly theoretic and it may not work very well (or may not even work at all) in practice. Visit http://www.usb.org/ for more information on USB connectivity.