As mentioned in my review, the Eee I bought had a pretty noisy fan. I compared it to a Harrier jump jet hovering outside my window, which was perhaps a little harsh Anyway, that Eee was sent back to the manufacturer and I now have a replacement Eee.

And it too has a noisy fan. But first things first. Remember that the Eee is completely silent for most of the time, until the fan spins up during heavy load (it happened when I was copying files across a network share, for example).

My new Eee's fan is not as noisy as the first, but it's definitely more of a whirr than a whisper.

Additionally, there's an intermittent whistle on both Eees, seemingly coming from the screen and separate from the fan. This only sounded once or twice, so again is not a problem most of the time. I couldn't see any cause for it.

There are cures for these problems when they occur. The whistle stopped after I rebooted the computer a few times in succession. The fan stops of its own accord when the computer is idle, provided you don't upgrade the BIOS to version 0401, which appears to have a bug whereby the fan doesn't stop spinning until you reboot.

...and the search for the perfect device continues!

Thats odd. Mine is more like a whisper. Perhaps you are having some bad luck.

I just ordered a black one these things are wonderful.

I probably am

Whatever the case, it sounds like quality control isn't too great on the Eees right now.

In addition to the whirr and the occasional whistle, an almost inaudible whine comes from the screen too. This isn't uncommon on cheap TFT screens, and several people on the eeeuser.com forum have reported a similar noise.

Who'd want to be an early adopter? You pay top dollar for hardware and it usually arrives full of hardware/software glitches.

That sounds familiar -cough-770-cough.... I still loved every bit of it! Now, with the N800, even with its few glitches I hardly ever tinker with it. I just use it. Of course, this might have something to do with that little creature that won't stop growing living in my apartment.... =)

Wow and I thought I was the only one with gremlins living with me LOL :P

It turns out this whistle comes out of the speakers, so can be stopped by muting the sound or by playing an MP3, which somehow seems to reset the sound system.

So with any luck this particular glitch will be fixed with a firmware or software fix.

It doesn't have to be that way. If you happen to have followed the Linutop evolution, you get an example of how beautiful and glitch-free commercial open source-based hardware can be.

The Linutop software updates have been just that: updates. I have yet to encounter a (major) bug in their system. Also interesting is that the Linutop people appear to actually listen to their users: Almost all of the upgrades had to do with user requests for media playing, video network sharing and DVB-T compatibility.

Linutop is a nice and quiet company, just like their product.

For the most part I agree. I held off on Xboxes and other devices, letting the impatient greedy people shake the bugs out first. But of course that all goes out the window where my job is concerned...