People who've visited me at home know that I'm a huge fan of total silence. I've taken considerable steps to end up with an office which is totally quiet (and consumes virtually no power as a nice side-effect). An obvious tip: turn off what you don't constantly need. Better still: make stuff turn off by itself after a certain time. Slightly less obvious but very effective: use 2.5" USB-powered external HD's where possible (on my NSLU2-based server, and attached to my MacBook Pro for Time Machine backups). Disk capacity is no longer an issue.

As I said, the result is perfect - and music is fun again, even at a very low volume.

Which makes this post hilarious ;)