Hehe, my thought exactly
I appreciate everyone's involvement and kindness for taking the time to respond but some replies seemed a bit off topic. Still interesting ideas, just not what I was looking for

 

Thx for the suggestion ArticStorm but my experience of trying what you describe hasn't been so successful.
With a previous laptop of mine, that's what I was doing to try and keep that laptop quiet but it didn't really work too well. The fan would still come on too often, even if the laptop wasn't being stressed too much or I had to lower the CPU use so drastically that it didn't really make much sense as it would impact it's performance too hard.
Also, I found the setting would somehow reset itself and I had to go back and make the settings again.
I can deal with it, but I don't want to have my girlfriend come whining at me if it starts humming to loudly.

 

I know you say she isn't very techy and you want a Windows laptop. But you should seriously consider an M1 Macbook. Reaper works just the same, and they are really cheap second hand right now. Absolutely fantastic laptop in every aspect, super duper fast and dead silent, will last years if condition is good

 

Hehe, I knew that was coming eventually. I'm sure what you're saying is true but...no thanks. We're real Apple/MacOS haters in the house

 

Most MacOS users are not "power users", they are just users; and there is almost nothing "new to learn" about the OS. Stick a PC wireless mouse with it and you even have that regular, old-skool right click. The fan on my i7 intel macbook pro is about 10x louder than my 5.1 Pro; the MBP is not really that quiet when using it for audio with lots of plugins pushing the cpu. The SoC M1 (apple silicons) people have suggested is really the best recommendation you are going to get. By far. With an internal SSD, there are almost 0 moving parts inside, and almost 0 of the concerns with malware, spyware, etc that most regular users encounter.

 

Last edited: Jun 17, 2023

Since there is no real solution for for a silent laptop being offered my first thought was to treat the issue's symptom. The Aston is by far the best filter that there is and a potential cure for the noise. I myself haven't a large room and kept my previous noisy desktop in an Ikea closet under hanging clothing as my solution (it worked really well), the Aston Halo taking up a bit too much real estate to my liking or else I would have used it in a heartbeat. My new machine is running silently, stealthily and like the sound of an owl flying in the night , the external hard drive I've been pulling my software off of to install the absolute only noise coming from that direction. My own case is solved and I am trying to help.

 

I don't doubt the Aston. I was just pointing out that the core issue in the OP was that the laptop is broken so he needs a new laptop. I get your point though, it doesn't matter what laptop he gets as long as he has sound treatment around the microphone.

 

It's become a fairly long thread so I don't expect anyone jumping in at this point to have read all the posts but somewhere in there, I had said this in reply to someone:

So this is to put aside any suggestion/recommendation that negates this requirement.
Still appreciate the effort and thought!

 

The "fanless" part of the thread title explains a lot of the mac m1 recommendations. Most of us are thinking about Case Noise like usual, not the microphone picking up external sources of noise like Typing. The conventional answer to that is usually a mic with a longer cable to get it away from the computer/daw, proofing, and a wireless kb you can use to punch-in to start your recording; but you may still get internal case noise within your recordings.