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.