Hi,

I'm gonna get a new laptop. I'm thinking on using my old computer as a 24/7 server. But it should do very few things: printer server and small http server for my family photo album. Also I'll probably write a script that autocopies certain folders of my laptop to server HD everytime I connect to my wireless lan.

So, all in all, the server would be idle most of the time. So, my questions are:

Is there some way to have a silent and low consuming PC using old hardware (or a cheap newest solution) ?
Is there some way to "power on" a pc remotely ? (I've seen something in the bios menu that says "wake on lan" but I don't know if it's related).

Bye and thanks in advance. Any other ideas/solutions are welcome.

SnOp

www.quietpc.com should help ya.

what kind of hardware do you have? it's sometimes possible to do things like undervolt the processor to run fanless, run exhaust fans on lower 5 or 7 volts instead of 12, decouple your PSU, fans and hard drives, use foam silencing material, and a lot of other things depending on how far you want to take it to get it really silent. it might be better to start over or to modify what you have, depending on what you DO have. it sounds like your BIOS/mobo have wake on lan though, so you should google it, there must be tons out there on how to do it.

I don't know wake-on-lan very well, but it seems to be very interesting.
One time I tried enabling it on my PC. At that time, I didn't have anything LAN, but my 56K modem was there. And guess what? Each time I received a phone call, the PC did start by itself!

I suppose it would be the same with a LAN plug (because of the name). Imagine: each time the phone or the LAN has activity, the PC powers up, see if there's an incoming fax or LAN connexion, and when all's done, calls the halt command.
I'll do this one day on my EPIA

Yves.

For a quiet PC, I recomment the Antec Sonata case. I have two of them about three feet from me (on the desk) and I can barely hear them. One of them is a dedicated slackware server.