Computer for music only?

The issue of noise in a PC is an interesting and complicated one. I think it goes without saying that the PC should not have a lot of other work being down on it. Surfing the Internet while playing music is just a bad idea. I also turn off any virus control when playing music. You should minimize what is running, but going to hibernate mode on JPlay seems extreme. Without running any special software on my laptop there is seldom more than 1% CPU usage other than the music player. I know there are all sorts of positions on this, so will not dwell on it.

One option is to deal with the issues outside of the PC. Products like ifi's iUSBPower or iPurifier or Empirical's various products like his reclocker can deal with many of the ill effects of the PC environment. One option is to do the obvious things to minimize PC usage and then use these outboard solutions. Food for thought.

Lewinskih01 - some people hear big differences from various optimizers, some do not. It seems to depend on a lot of factors. I can find a large number of people who report little or no improvement for the various programs that shut down lots of processes. I respect what you found but I do not believe that means it will be true for everyone. As I said, it is a complicated issue and there are tons of discussions on this issue in lots of forums.

I just wanted to point out that there are external options to consider.