It's odd. Computer engineers have spent 20 years fanatically improving every aspect of the PC: figuring out how to make machines faster, smarter, better looking, better sounding and easier to use. They've done just about everything except make the damn things quiet.

"Sometimes all the noise makes me feel like I'm working pit-side at the Indy 500," says Frank Kurzawa, a computer programmer in Austin, Texas, who operates as many as five computers at a time in his home office. "Since I do it for a living, I take it for granted as one of the penalties of [programming]. It's the price you have to pay for working with computers."

The true noise culprits are, of course, the cooling fans, but without them your computer would probably melt. One fan blows outside air onto the processor; the other pulls hot air out of the PC's power supply to keep the transformer and capacitors from getting too hot. And exacerbating the loudness issue is the intermittent, high-pitched whine of the hard drive.

There are loads of after-market gizmos you can install to hush up your PC, such as quieter fans or disk drive silencers.

But of all the computers now on the market, the only full-size desktop computer that comes almost silent off the shelf is Apple's iMac. It's a slick machine that's remarkably quiet, since it doesn't use an obnoxious-sounding cooling fan -- or any fan at all. But compared with IBM compatibles, I found its price tag too high and the available software too limiting. I couldn't afford to buy a new suite of software for the Mac OS. Nor did I want to have to learn a new set of software commands.

The iMac I looked at came with a 350 MHz processor, 6-gigabyte hard drive, 64 megs of RAM and a standard CD-ROM drive for $999. By comparison, the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion I took home appeared to be a far better value. It has a 533 MHz processor, 20-gigabyte hard drive, 64 megs of RAM, a DVD player, a CD-RW and a bushel of software, all for $900. There is just one small problem: The box sounds like a miniature B-1 bomber on takeoff.

OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But the constant whine drives me crazy. And I'm not alone; an informal survey of my peers convinced me that plenty of people are bothered by the hum of their PCs.

Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, says he frequently fields calls from people who want to know how to quiet their PCs. "They say, 'I've got this computer and it's driving me crazy,'" he says with a chuckle. Blomberg has wrestled with the problem himself. The noise-averse activist took his computer apart and installed rubber gaskets on the brackets that hold the hard drive in place. Unfortunately, Blomberg says, the gaskets didn't help. His solution: Stash the computer underneath the desk, as far away from his ears as he can get it.

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