Although my earlier attempt at quietening my gaming system failed miserably, it’s finally now one tenth as noisy as it was before. It’s still not exactly complete silence, but it’s like an empty library in comparison to what it used to be.
How did I do it? It was rather simple, actually — I just ripped two of the three hard drives out. One of them had been acting up lately, going through bursts where it would suddenly power down and back up again. No data had been lost, but I don’t really trust it anymore. The other one was an ancient 12G drive, and the only reason it was even still in there was because it was the boot drive and removing it would have required reinstalling all of the OSes, which is moot now.
Plus, removing the drives removed the need for a couple power splitters and one IDE cable, so the cabling isn’t quite so chaotic inside. I also discovered that I was using a 40-pin cable on the remaining drive, so switching in an 80-pin cable should get it up to full speed. The video card doesn’t have to split its power with a drive anymore, which will hopefully help with some strange video driver crashes. And without the other drives, there will be less heat generated. Ripping out all this stuff has made the system the quietest, coolest, and most stable it’s been in years. Damn, I should have done this a long time ago…
Of course, now I have to reinstall everything and I’m about 40G shorter on space (with 100 left), but I can live with that. I just won’t reinstall Linux on it, which hadn’t been getting much use anyway. I also won’t both reinstalling Win98SE, since pretty much everything I have works under XP now, and the few that didn’t (Pod, Daggerfall) aren’t too important anymore.