No moving parts: Thin client laptop?

I've been looking for noiseless fanless laptops, and the available ones are either too expensive, too small screened, or discontinued. One crazy option would be to use a thin client laptop (from HP or Wyse) and use a SD card as the "hard drive". These laptops have no fan and no hard drive, along with low voltage processors.

It looks like they're only meant for businesses accessing centralized software, but would it be possible to use it as a personal laptop? I don't know anything about booting off a flash drive, thin clients in general, etc, and I want to see if this option is possible. If so, I'd be okay with a 32GB hard drive so long as I hear nothing but the sound of myself thinking.

 

ha, your a funny guy.
Are you serious.

You want to use a thin client as a laptop. Thin clients are like portable pc's but not really pc's. They are basically a portable KVM switch with its own processor. They really cant operate on their own. They are dependant on the server from which they are running from. Having a thin client as a laptop is just ridiculous. My calculator has more cpu power

Are you really that keen to the sound of fans. Most laptops are so silent that you cant hear them unless the room is completely silent.

Most laptops are really quiet. The only parts making noise are the cpu fan/gpu fan and the harddrive.

Your only option maybe the EEE pc or the Samsung Q1 ultra, cause they use very low voltage cpu's and their fan is very small, and both have SSD storage.

K-TRON

 

The new Dell Mini 9 is fanless and packs SSD too.

 

Dell Inspiron 9 comes standard with an SSD (albeit only a few GB) and completely passive cooling. Not to mention it's cheaper than most flavors of EEE

EDIT: Oops, admlam got there before me.

 

The HP 12 inch thin client has the same processor as the HP mininote, and the 15 inch one has a better processor. Either is fine for me, as I only surf the web, watch movies, and do stats stuff. Is it that a thin client physically can not stand alone? It would have an okay processor, a smallish hard drive, and 2GB of RAM. What's missing?

As far as fans go, I only became keen to them when I noticed that all the super-light 13 inch dual cores had louder fans than my old Dell. I guess it comes with the territory when you pack the same computing power in a smaller package. And that's what I'm in the market for--light but quiet or noiseless, especially in a library setting.

 

Good suggestion, but tried the MSI Wind and it was a bit small for extended use with a 10 inch screen. Other than the Toughbook, thin clients are the only laptop I found that are noiseless at bigger screen sizes.

 

I'm not sure, but MacBook Air?

 

Yeah, it seems Macs in general, and maybe aluminum casings in general, are quieter. Supposedly Lenovos also have good cooling systems. There's tons of threads on NBR though from people who bought a computer that was supposed to be quiet (such as inspiron 1420 or xps m1330) that actually has a constant or abnormally loud intermittant fan. So if I can avoid that altogether, that would be great!

 

As I understand by definition a "thin client" depends on a server. But if most of what your doing depends on a web server, movie server I see your argument.

Then there is the question of "stats" (statistics?) depending on what your talking about some statistics packages need a significant amount of disk space for the observations processing. And you will need one that runs under linux if your going to use some of those ultra-portables.

 

What is your budget? You could purchase a generally quiet system, install an SSD and then heavily undervolt and throttle your CPU. Should be enough to keep the fan at basically off.

Running a P8600 or whatever at 50-75% will still be faster than most of those sub-notebooks at full capacity. You can also always switch back over to full power when you need it. You also get better battery life. Of course this is probably going to be $1,000-1,400 by the time you finish instead of $400-600 for a sub-notebook.

P.S. Whats so bad about fans?

 

I don't get it! If it's got a CPU, RAM, flash hard drive, and embedded XP, why can't a thin client serve as a standalone computer? A few hours of web searching yielded these possible reasons:

-Mabe Embedded XP won't allow you to run some applications unless they're on a server?
-Is there some circuitry that thin clients are missing that regular laptops have?
-Flash card read/write/access times aren't fast enough?

I'm hoping none of these are true and this would somehow work out. There's all kinds of threads with people complaining about fan noise, and I'm in the upper echelon of noise sensitivity. I'd totally sacrifice power and speed to get a noiseless laptop!

Come to think of it, why isn't there a niche for silent laptops? I sure as heck don't need dual cores and 320 gigs of RAM to check email, watch DVDs, and type word documents.

 

I can't undervolt my new Montevina Fujitsu and Vaio enough to impact the fan; not sure if the chip isn't supported yet by RM Clock or if I screwed up. But you're right...I could get something with an older chip or look through the undervolting thread to find success stories and get the same laptop.

Fans are bad because I'm sensitive to intermittant noise. For example, a small dog moved into the apartment below me, and it yaps about 8 times an hour, at uneven intevals. I'd love to ignore it, but the annoyance is hard wired into my brain. Plus my 3 year old Dell 600M was pretty much silent except for the hard drive, so I'm spoiled.

HP offers a 12 and 15 inch thin client. Both are pretty light, simple looking, and under $1000. Either would be great for me as long as I could use it as a stand alone with embedded XP handling normal non-centralized applications.

 

Update: I gave up on my silent laptop quest for now. An HP rep told me that "using a thin client as a stand alone is not supported by HP". Couldn't quite get him to give a specific reason though. He said the CPU was too weak (although it's more powerful than my existing old laptop's), the flash drive was too small, and the computer isn't meant to run applications without a server.

Oh well! I asked on that "ask an admin" website, and that guy said it was possible. But I don't want to be a guinea pig, so no fanless laptop this year.

 

If you NEED a laptop:
I would suggest trying to work with RMClock, The Santa Rose and refresh have both worked perfectly as well as the Pentium M (I think). So the Montevina MUST support it. Make sure to actually follow the guide if it hasn't worked (HWMoniter specifically).

Also there are programs that you could use to force fans to one speed. If your undervolted and throttled you shouldn't get hot enough to be a real problem. Just find another relatively quiet laptop and try it out. My T61p is generally extremely quiet and very cool, with the integrated model (on sale for CHEAP due to the old platform (called T61)) it should work well for you. If they start at like $1000, get 30% with the sales you can go buy an SSD (though I really doubt you need it).

Otherwise (since it sounds like you don’t), what you need doesn’t exist yet but is getting closer. SSDs should fall in price basically half every 18 months and CPUs have finally started to use less power (New P series Core 2 Duo use 25 watts vs. 35 watts) so we should be seeing quiet or silent PCs soon. Give it 3-5 years and someone will probably be selling one.