As many of us know, the TX2Z has a loud fan.  In fact, it produces as much noise at the low fan speed as my old TC1100 did at high fan speed.  (TC1100 was a Compaq design before the merger, and from what I've read, it had heavy ODM input.  A shame the detachable screen concept died off -- most TC1100 owners I've met have loved it.)

I have a related question -- not specific to the Touchsmart, but about HP PCs in general.  I figure this community probably know more about this subject than the average man on the street.

Are HP consumer desktops pretty quiet in terms of fan noise, or loud?  I'm considering a new desktop, and looking for information.  I've generally avoided HP consumer desktops because I had a bad experience with one that sounded like a jet engine.  And, of course, my TX2Z tablet is also not quiet.  On the other hand, I once had a super-quiet xw-series office desktop, that was even quieter than the Dell business PCs in my office.  This makes me wonder if I should continue avoiding the consumer desktop product line, and look only at the business lineup.

Design teams really seem to have very different philosophies on fan noise -- Gateway desktops have a moderate amount of fan noise (I've had three), but E-Machines desktops are much quieter, even though they come from the same parent company, and even though E-Machines is strictly a consumer lineup.  At one point, I thought this was because E-Machines had less-powerful processors so they could get away with less cooling -- but this continued to be true even into the dual-core era.

This is a tricky issue because you can't really judge fan noise in a store, and nobody advertises this in their specifications, and reviewers also don't seem to care too much.  You basically have to rely on word of mouth and personal experiences (either that, or resign yourself to replacing cooling components after you buy the PC).