Forget it..  What you are asking of a computer is impossible unless it is designed 
from the ground up with silent or fanless technology hardware.  XP is not designed 
to run without a hard drive period.  Moving to a RAM drive involves increasing CPU 
activity which increases heat, which increases FAN activity.  Is this a desktop system 
or a laptop/portable?  There are newer drives that are virtually silent, so I can 
only guess that you have an older noiser drive if you can hear it over the fans. 
 Look first at the hardware because you aren't going to find a way in software to 
reduce noise if the hardware is noisy to begin with.  No WIndows operating system 
is designed for silence, as it is just impossible with current technology.  There 
are computer systems designed to be very quiet, but involves fanless heatsinks, heat 
pipes, and the sound reducing cases, quieter hard drives etc.  Portables need fans 
so there isn't much of an option for a real quiet portable.  Software enters the 
mix when it runs in the background which uses more CPU load, which adds to noise 
etc etc.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is with current software and hardware technology 
today.  You can run some Linux distro's from strictly memory, but you can't do much 
with it.  Certianly nothing like you can do with Windows, but if you shut it down 
without saving the state/config to the hard drive, you start over with a clean slate 
with no apps installed, except what loads from the CD when you boot.

Finally, whatever answers you need, you won't find on this forum, as you are asking 
for something that Windows wasn't designed to do and in your case, it's more to do 
with hardware design than Windows, which by the way, all modern operating systems 
today share the same characteristics with Windows in how they work on this level. 
 You should also be aware that to many start/stop cycles on a hard drive can dramatically 
shorten it's life span.  Especially if it's a larger desktop drive rather than a 
portable, but they are all effected.







On Monday, December 3, 2007 at 7:07 am, Jon wrote:

>I've tried this. I have about the quietest fan possible, but any consistant droning 

>noise will set off this screeching in my head. Even the ultrasonic rat alarm does 

>the trick. Now I know what rats have to go through.

>

>But logically, I've moved all the temp folders to the ram drive, and so it should 

>be running the drive at all. But some random process makes a milisecond click, and 

>the drive starts up for another 3 min.

>

>I tried downloading something called revosleep. but it refuses to sleep my drive. 

>I read online that in windows 2003 server, there's a drive sleep "disk timeout" 
setting 

>which goes down to 20 seconds, but on XP, it only goes as low as three minutes. 
I 

>was hoping there was a hack to lower this time out, without having to change operating 

>systems. 

• Reply or follow-up to this message

• Search this forum
• Start a new thread on a different subject

• Report abuse of the forum