The two main sources of noise are - Fan
- Hard Drive
To slowdown the fan.... create a file /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf, it needs 1 line "options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1". Then do "echo level 1 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan" to change the speed to the slowest speed (with out stopping it). As usual I put that in my favourite startup script... /etc/init.d/cpuspeed. The level depends on your usage, I suspect 1 is fine for most people. It is enough to decrease the temperature to about 42C. When you use the cpu it will go up, but when it's mostly idle it will come back down. If you're using the cpu a lot like for games or as a production server then this won't do. For people who's cpu is idle most of the time, this will be quiet and cool. To slow the hard drive down... "hdparm -M 128 /dev/sda". As always I put that in /etc/init.d/cpuspeed as well. Now it's almost dead quiet. I can still heard the HD spinning slowly but the only way to get rid of that would be to buy an SSD which is still too expensive at this current time. | 