I already have a notebook, and I'd like to connect my 3 screens so a desktop would be more convenient.
Nat

very quiet compared to the older systems, I have an off the shelf hp quad that I cant even hear at all unless a dvd is in it

Thanks !
That's what I wanted to hear !

I have an HP xw8600 workstation (as opposed to a regular PC).

It is amazingly quiet, even with a workstation graphics card and 4 hard drives.

HP has workstations starting at $700, I would recommend you at least look at these.
(eBay can be a good start for this.)

The laptop idea is a good one, especially if you need a laptop. However, I have a Dell laptop which started out quiet and has now become quite noisy. Unlike a standard PC, where i can rebuild/lubricate/replace the fans when they become noisy (which I do all the time), a laptop is really tough to fix inside. Thus, you will be stuck once the fan bearing starts to go (which it will).

An alternative I would strongly suggest is to look into purchasing a "media PC." These are personal computers which are designed to be the center of your home theater system and as a result have been both designed and then built specifically with low noise as one of the main design objectives. Many vendors build them and you can get specific recommendations over at the AVS Forums. Here is a link (no recommendation implied) to a computer vendor I like (Polywell) showing their particular offering:

Polywell Media Center

Here's a link to an old Tom's Hardware article on the subject of quiet media center PCs:

Tom's Hardware Media Center PCs

I'm sure if you Google around you'll find many, more recent articles that will provide similar info.

You can also take a look at Silent PC Review:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

Jøran Toresen

Jøran, that is a great link. Very useful. Thanks!

If you decide to try a "media PC," make sure it doesn't run Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Why?

Major incompatibilities with key applications, especially anything involving media outside of Windows Media Player.

Media PCs are indeed built for home theater media playback and they are generally designed to be less noisy, but compatibility has been a real issue for many.

Vista may be better in this case, but you should check before buying if you want to avoid potentially fatal hassles (fatal here means a reformat of the system drive with a non-Media Edition of Windows)

If you're doing video for a living, workstations are a frequently overlooked way to save trouble. Top pros use them for a reason, many others don't know the difference (because they never used them) or they don't care.

If you decide to try a "media PC," make sure it doesn't run Windows XP Media Center Edition.That's news to me. I have a computer that includes the Media Center operating system. I am unable to tell any difference between this and Windows XP Pro and I have never heard of any compatibility problems with anything. I run Vegas, DVDA, PowerDVD, iTunes, PhotoImact, Sound Forge, VirtualDub, and many other media apps and players.

Vista, on the other hand, still apparently has multiple driver problems.

So, while I definitely cannot say that the Media Center O/S is identical to XP Pro, I would definitely recommend doing some research to see if this problem, if it exists, would actually affect anything YOU are planning to do. It sure works for me, and in almost four years of using this, I have not encountered anything that suggests any difference from XP Pro.

I helped my son-in-law set up his first office a few years ago, and soon found that even the printers he had planned to use were not compatible with XP MCE, i.e. the regular XP drivers didn't work and the printer manufacturer acknowledged the problem but said they weren't going to fix it. Very odd, I can't see why (or even how) MS would screw this up.

I helped my son-in-law set up his first office a few years ago, and soon found that even the printers he had planned to use were not compatible with XP MCE, i.e. the regular XP drivers didn't work and the printer manufacturer acknowledged the problem but said they weren't going to fix it. Very odd, I can't see why (or even how) MS would screw this up.Very interesting, and I guess not completely surprising. This sounds like what happened when Microsoft created a "transition" operating system between Win98 and Win XP and called it "Windows Millennium." That sucker was always a kludge and never seemed to be fully supported by Microsoft. It sounds like the media center edition of XP may be somewhat similar, being a transition, of sorts, between XP and Vista. While it has worked fine for me, I have only used four printers with it, and not many other drivers, so it is quite possible that some things might not work.

So, it sounds like some caution is in order if you buy a media center PC that is fully configured. Perhaps you can get the same piece of hardware, but configured with the OS of your choice (my choice is still XP Pro, not Vista).

> 'make sure it doesn't run Windows XP Media Center Edition'

No problems running XP MCE here (on one desktop and two laptops).

There can be an incompatibility between Vegas 7 and Media Center but this breaks Media Center rather than the other way around (renaming cfhd.dll (the CineForm HD codec) in \WINDOWS\system32 takes care of the problem (assuming you don't need to use it...))