There are those who would have you believe that Krzys Majewski wrote: > Damien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > i've been working on a stand alone music player for the last couple of > > months. > > it's currently a bit loud (being based around an old p166 with a very noisy > > hdd & powersupply fan. > > I can't help wondering if you could do away with the hdd altogether, > e.g. booting the thing once and for all from floppies. The P/S fan > solution I've posted before -- if it's an old and wimpy machine and > you're daring you could maybe try even more extreme things like nuking > the fan altogether. (Check your household fire insurance?) Along the > same lines, you could try disabling the CPU fan as well if you have > one. I ran my PIII-500E for a few hours with the CPU fan unplugged and > it didn't even blink. It seems to me that there is a bit of room for > trial and error here, especially if you can afford it: if the CPU > overheats, the machine will crash. Whether this damages the CPU > permanently I don't know, any electronics types here that know > anything about this? >
This is a good idea about just tossing the hard drive. You could also write a bootable CDR and just use that. I would be very careful about running a CPU without a fan. IIRC, you said you were using a Pentium 166. With a good heatsink and enough airflow past the heatsink you could do without a fan. Newer CPUs cannot run without a fan; AMD specifically recommends that you never power on an Athlon without a heatsink and fan, not even for a couple of seconds just to make sure it works.
