Looking for a silent laptop...

Subc

I'm looking for a silent laptop. I checked dell.ie but I'dd like to get some feedback on them, are they loud or no? can u suggest anything else if they are.

thanx

ButtermilkJack

I bought a new samsung x20 about four months ago and I have to say I don't think its loud at all. Now, this being my first laptop I'm not sure what to expect. But put it this way, once or twice I have heard the hard-drive and/or optical drive spin like mad which was quite loud so I know how loud things could get. But for the most part, I barely hear a thing.

Great looking machine too, very thin and less than 2.4kg in weight. Can't complain

Karoma

There's no such thing as a silent laptop - unless of course,you want a custom-built fan-free,optical-disc-free unit..
HDDs are usually extremely quiet these days,an optical drive is as noisy as it has to be - you could always get one that has a detachable,external drive only.. or just not use the optical drive. The fan is the noisiest part - if you want quiet-you want low power or Centrino.. and underclock:)
Ex: VAIO: T series is really quiet -v- S & K series which can be quite loud.

Capt'n Midnight

yeah centrino and turn on all the power saving.
buy lots of memory > 1GB so you use the disk less , save to memory etc.
you could also buy some sort of flash memory to save files on

kdouglas

if its an option for you, buy an apple ibook or powerbook, very quiet machines

Wertz

The only thing I hear from my insp8600 is when I manually turn on the cooling fans...only really hear the HDD at boot. Obviously the optical drive makes noise (although not much) but you only ever hear that when ripping or installing from a disc, it's unnoticable during DVD playback.

Duffman

I have a Dell D600 with a 5k rpm hard drive and it's bloody noisy all the time, even when idle. Get a 4k rpm drive if silence is more important to you than performance.

maidhc

I have a Dell Inspiron 2200 and a Latitude x300. The Inspiron is very quiet except when using the optical drive. The fan kicks in sometimes, and it is audible, but nothing like some old p4 laptops I have heard.

The latitude is pretty much silent, it has a fan, buit it rarely comes on, and when it does it is more or less inaudible. The noisiest thing is the hard drive, which again is barely noticible.

The x300 has been replaced by the x1, which as far as I know does not have any fan.

Subc

yes i was looking at the dell inspiron 6000

WillyWonka

I have a toshiba satelite, very quite. much quieter than any dell I've ever heard.

Lynx500

why do you need it quiet?

hamster

I have a 3 year old Dell Inspiron 2650 and the part that is loud is the fan. It's quiet until it has to come on full blast. It's a mobile P4 1.8Ghz. Play a few demos from the demoscene or some heavy cpu cruncher and on it comes! Whiiiiiiish! I assume the new laptops are quieter even at full throttle after a few hours?

The hard drive seems quiet (It's a 4500 rpm 2.5" hitachi). Obviously the CDR/DVD drive can get loud but that's expected. Actually I used Nero's CD Drive utility to slow it down to x1 or x2 speed to make it very quiet.

Going off topic for 2 msecs... while I remember it... anyone able to install the latest Encarta DVD version (not CD version) completely to disk? That spin up time can be aggravating!

rsynnott

The Apple iBooks are very quiet, though not completely silent. You generally can't hear the fan. They do, however, make a VERY disturbing noise with the CD drive when waking from hibernation.

el Bastardo

Modern laptops are, in general, fairly quiet due to better chip/heatsink designs and quieter hard disks. Previous poster said that optical drives are a cause of noise: they only cause noise when they are in use. I've used older Dells and IBMs, circa 2002, and newer Fujitsu-Siemens models. I haven't found any to be particularly offensive. Can't say the same about Compaqs.

It really depends on what your noise threshold is.