mp3pc

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This project is something that I've had on the back burner forever. It's finally done.

Ever since we've been in this house and I've had a real receiver (thanks Brian, Mike, and everyone else who kicked in for the wedding gift), I've wanted to get my music into the living room. I've tried a 2.4 GHz wireless transmitter, toyed with the idea of buying a Squeezebox, checked out all the various wireless mp3 devices, and hooked up my Nano from time to time. Nothing satisfied my desire for overkill, i.e. building up an entire computer to sit in the entertainment center.

Thanks to my parents buying me a new computer for graduation, I finally had the parts I needed to build the system. I found a 160gb drive for $25 after rebates and such, and bought a Silverstone LC03 case from Fry's. It felt a little strange to gut the computer that served me so well for the last five years, but it was time.


preparing for the transplant


static-free storage area


this space is obviously more cramped than the previous one


everything's finally in


in action


These pictures give the appearance that this was an easy job. Ha.


The first problem was that I decided that a few beers would make for a more enjoyable task. I guess that was true to a degree. The second was learning that there is such a thing as locking IDE cables. Who thought those were a good idea? If you pull and something doesn't come off, the instinct is to pull harder, not look for some stupid clips. Third, the secondary hard drive tray was sitting directly on top of the memory, making cable routing impossible. I ended up dremeling the drive mounts for one of the floppy bays, only getting a few metal shavings in my eye.

The most frustrating issue was that the motherboard didn't seem like the new horizontal orientation. I couldn't get a POST beep, so I brought the video card into work to make sure I didn't kill it by blowing dust out of it. It checked out, so I tried it again at home. No go. In frustration, I started poking and pulling on the motherboard, which resulted in the system booting. It took a few iterations of this until I realized that the pulling was what resolved the short/bad circuit. I pulled everything back out, installed a shim underneath the motherboard, put all the drives back in, and proceeded to load the OS.

A couple of days after the last picture above, I finished filling up the entertainment center by placing the second receiver (for the deck and bedroom) on top of it. That's when the PC decided to stop booting. Again. I was about ready to give up and go buy a new motherboard, but decided to take one more shot at shimming the old one. There is now a 3/4" piece of synthetic wine cork sitting between the bottom of the case and the motherboard. I really hope I'm right about its compression characteristics.

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This page contains a single entry by Travis published on February 26, 2006 9:41 PM.

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