Case worklog: Cleaning up a wounded warrior

[Duke{CLR}]

Nice work WT. I'm glad to see the other 6800 has found a home.

[Kenshin Himura]

Looking good, WT!

[WalkinTarget]

Well, last weekend was finally our 'build' weekend, so my two fine young High School wanna-be PC geeks were over to watch and help me assemble this thing, so here's a few pics of the end result:

Everything plugged in, ready to boot:



Ohhh, purty lights !!:



Sorry for not adding pics of the actual build, but I had grossly underestimated the time it would take to build it !! I told the parents it'd be about 2.5 hours, and it was over 4.5 hours !! Its easy to build one, but now stop and comment on every component that goes INTO the PC, and then the wiring usually takes me 2+ hours by itself !!
Anyhoo, its done .. I still haven't decided if I want to dual boot it, but so far it has XP on one HD and I'd like to try Ubuntu with Beryl on the other drive. I had fun and hopefully helped these guys with the basics on building a PC.
We ended the day playing Peggle Extreme until their parents picked them up, and the one kid, having never played Peggle before, simply pwned every level. He cleared all 10 levels in 40 minutes time.

[juneau]

Looks great WT. I feel like building another PC now. But i don't think i need anymore.

[WalkinTarget]

So far, I have some issues to deal with:

Ultra 500w PSU is nowhere near the +12 output from an identical Ultra unit that I have running higher end hardware in another rig. What is up wif DAT ???

Did you ever try overclocking when your PSU is running 11.4v on the +12 rail ?? Yea, its not good. Even so, I got the 2.0ghz chip up to 3.0 but couldn't get it stable. Needless to say, another PSU is in the works.

Also, I had hoped the miscellaneous parts would blend better, but the CCFL tubes (even tho I ordered the white units) came marked as UV lights, and you can see how they are clearly UV in the pic.

Black and Duke will recognize the video card, and that will stay in there until I decide what I want to do with the PC. I already got an offer on it, but would you sell a dual boot, blinged out rig to a co-worker who just needs internet and some mild gaming on the side ? That's like buying a combine to mow your lawn ..

[ryanbatc]

Ohhh nice looking case.....clean paint job.....jeeese that would take patience lol!!!

[WalkinTarget]

Thanks, ryan ! If I had to do it again, I'd reconsider flat black. I had hoped it would hide some slight imperfections and whatnot, but it is no better than semi or gloss. One thing that bugged me was the optical drives are all flat black, so that in a nutshell is why I went with flat black !!
Either way, I have cleaned up what was always a somewhat damaged case, and returned it to active service as well. It had been sitting on a shelf for the better part of a year now, waiting for me to deal with it.

I like having a rig that I can screw around with, and this fits the bill. I loaded a Vista theme for XP on it last night, and even if it hosed things, I didn't lose anything other than an OS repair install. All of my PCs have some purpose for their existence, but everyone likes to have one PC that they can 'damn the torpedoes' and test out crap like that, with no repercussions.