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"geeks are supposed to be lazy, right?"

OK, this is my medium term silicon-based plan:

1. Buy a 'Doom III' bunch of components: new mobo, CPU, Geforce FX etc. I'm going to stick it all in my Lian-Li case, buy a top of the range heatsink and maybe overclock.

2. Buy a Shuttle and put all my current components into that.

Then I'll use the Shuttle for working/surfing/wasting time, and it will be blissfully silent. And when I want to play Doom III, I will enter the wind tunnel. The one drawback I can see here is that I've only got one monitor. Now I *could* just switch the cables round as required, but being a geek (and therefore lazy) I would like something easier. So does anyone know of a switching device, preferably one powered by thought alone? And where can I get it?

{Note to Ftozzi: your opinion is not required}

You can usually change the amount of ram that the video uses in the bios all the way up to 64mb that might improve 3d performance mate.

c.b.

This laptop I'm currently using is stunningly quiet. The CD drive is quite noisy when it spins up and spins down, but that's ofc only when I'm using it :O) Apart from that, the HD clicks occasionally, and it fires its cooling fan once in a while. No idea how it gets away with being so quiet, so cool, and is still 1.4Ghz! Admittedly it was shiet at Quake 3 (only 8MB VRAM), but it kicks Windows around like a childs toy.

Now if only it were mine <:O/

Hmm!

http://www.shuttle.com/new/product/ barebone/specs_b.asp?B_id=11

Urgh I hate the spacewalker site, it's too biiiiiggg

SN41G2 though.

It's the nforce chipset I'm going for; can't remember the model number off-hand, but as I recall, it does include a geforce graphics card.

as i said dude, remote desktop is pretty easy and there is a wizard on winxp that helps you do it, this will cost you nothing, as long as you don't want to do much 3d work on the shuttle pc then the onboard is o.k. although you have to share the ram with it, you can choose the amount to share, or you could buy the shuttle with the nforce 2 chipset as i belive the onboard video is a geforce card (i could be wrong hav'nt looked).

c.b.

I've just done a search on SR for "switch" and "KVM" and it returned nothing so hopefully SR wont get funny if I say take a trip to ebuyer, 2 port KVM switch for the massive total of £23. You'll need to buy two sets of cables at about £8 each.

Total solution excl p&p for £41. Probably about £5 for p&p.

Got a set of these at home, very good and very handy :D

Cheers, I'll have a look about.

I know Shuttle's don't have much expansion, but I don't really need much. The reason I'm buying one is so that I can have a quiet working environment. I'll be putting an 1800XP into it, which is more than enough processing power for my day to day needs; and I'll probably sell my current graphics card and use the onboard graphics of the Shuttle.

You do realize that shuttle pc's don't have much expansion the one's i have seen only have 1 agp, 1pci and 1cnr and it isnt really a good idea to put a high spec graphics card in them, you could network the 2 computers together and use remote desktop so you can have switch from one desktop to the other on your main gaming pc.

c.b.

Have a search for KVM devices, not sure if Special Reserve sell them, but many others do.

I've got a 4 port Belkin SoHo KVM switch (not the USB version) which allows me to switch a single keyboard, monitor and mouse between up to 4 PC's.

The SoHo device requires no external power supply and is pretty good, but will add around £100 on to your costs, plus around £15 extra for each set of cables you require.

Check that whatever solution you go for can handle the resolution you will be using though.