My Silent System

These are the specific steps I took to make my computer silent. This isn't necessarily the best way to do it, as I constrained by what parts I already had, by budget, and also did not know as much about the topic as I do now:

I bought a TK-230PA-1U power supply from TK Power. It is fanless up to 150W peak continuous usage. My computer burns about half of that, but I put some extra heat sinking on the PSU just to be conservative. It is almost always cold to the touch now. On a side note: TK Power was a pain to deal with. I ended up waiting over a month, and paying over $100 for the PSU. However, the PSU that arrived seems to be well constructed and good quality (machining and soldering looks solid)
My CPU is a Via C3 866. It is designed to run fanless. I got a free review sample from Via, so it came with a large (but cheap) fanless heat sink.
My hard drive falls asleep after a minute, so it rarely makes noise (ironically, because of this page, this is no longer as true; since my machine is hosting this page, and I get about a hundred hits a day from about 50 unique users, the hard drive wakes up every couple of minutes for the web server). I placed it within a SilentDrive enclosure to keep it quieter when it does. From my bed, I can barely hear the hard drive spinning (from my bed, it is quieter than the ambient noise in my room, but because of the way ears can corrolate quiet sound sources based on location, I can still make it out). I do still hear the seeks, as I have a moderately noisy hard drive. In several months of usage, the temperature of the drive has stayed well within the recommended margins.

Either way, I can sleep at night with my computer on. With the SilentDrive, I can even sleep with it on and the hard drive spinning. My next steps will be to:

Heat sink all the chips on my motherboard, sound card and ethernet card. Sadly, I need to skip my rather hot graphics card, since I don't want to blow it's warranty (replacing it is expensive, since it has a special digital interface to talk to my monitor).
When I get rich, buy a hard drive from one of the quieter Fujitsu or Samsung lines. Some of those things are virtually silent even without an enclosure.

You can find more detailed specs on my machine, or go back to the guide to silent computing