Hi,

I have my office / desk in my bedroom. My computer is pretty noisy and it gets annoying when i leave it on overnight, due to it's noise.

I am thinking about getting a KVM extender (or similar) to keep the computer in an other room (next door), but keep the keyboard and screen in the bedroom / office.

I noticed that most of the KVM extenders run for about $ 100.00

Is there a cheaper way to do this? Am I looking in the wrong section? Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks!

the cable routing could be a pain, also long vga cables are not good for signal quality, and dvi cables have a max length of 15m iirc. It might be easier to spend the money on making your computer quieter. Don't know where you hail from, but here in the uk, silent psu's can be had for around £70, or close to silent for £35, silent cpu coolers are £35ish and depending on your graphics card, silent heatsinks are availiable for those too.
nexus do some cheap and very quiet case fans, and both zalman and coolermaster do very quiet and efficent cpu fans if you dont want to go totally fanless.

Well, the computer is crammed full with 3 hard drives, multiple controller cards for FireWire (external hds) and so on... It does generate a bunch of heat, and it has one chassis fan, which i really plan on keeping, since i put it in after the computer kept on overheating.

I was looking at something like this, and i was planning on putting the computer itself in the garage ;-) ...

http://www.kvm-switches-online.com/0dt23008a.html

The only thing bothering me: $$$. I don't see the justification for these prices; it's just like golden usb cables for 30+.

I am wondering: is there a chaper way to accomplish the above?

not really while maintaining video quality. even this solution degrades the quality somewhat, and this is a fairly high-quality (although expensive) way of doing things.
sadly the prices are that much because its a non-trivial task. that little box takes the video and data signals and encodes it into a specific data signal (this varies from mfr to mfr, some use tcp data that can be switched normally, by the look of this one it uses a raw data type that cannot be switched but can be patched) and then is decoded on the other end. its a reasonably complex piece of hardware.
also remember with this solution you would need to move the audio about as well - and if you wanted to put a cd in you would need to walk out to the garage to do it...

basically whatever you do you are going to be spending a fair amount of money. i would expect to spend around 100-150 on either making your computer quiet (its very possible, no matter how many controller crads and hdds you have) or by putting it in the garage.

unfortuantely these two are really the only options i would reccomend.. it is possible to run raw video over cat-5 but you are going to be looking at a max of about 800x600 at probably no hi9gher than 60hz over that distance. you may be able to find a cable specialist who will make you up a very long vga cable, but you are not going to get much better quality than cat-5 over the sort of distance you are talking, and it will not be cheap.

is there a way around leaving it on at night? if you are just leaving it on to download stuff maybe use an old computer hidden away somewhere and just remote desktop into it when you want to set stuff to download.