Briefcase PC mod

I needed a new PC. None of my PCs would work. It seems as if I was cursed. All I had was my iBook and I was just breaking down wanting to use Linux and play some games for a change.

My friend Ryan C. upgraded his computer and sold me his old parts for $80.

• ASUS A8V motherboard; AMD socket 939 (ATX)
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ at 2ghz socket 939
• AOpen Aeolus Nvidia 6600 GT AGP card

Parts I already had.

• 420w PSU (ATX)
• 80gb 3.5″ HDD
• Laptop DVD/CDRW optical drive
• 512mb DDR memory at 400mhz
• Arctic Silver 5 CPU paste
• PC case
• 3 Pentium 2 processor fans for cooling
• MS Windows XP Pro SP2

And the rest I had to buy.

• 1gb DDR memory at 400mhz
• CoolerMaster CPU cooler

So I built the PC in an average “beige box.” Well there was a lan-party coming up and I wanted something special for it. Well I noticed my brother wasn’t using his old electronics briefcase. I asked if I can have it and he said I can… well actually he said use it, not destroy it but how would I know that. So I thought about it for about 3 days and made sure it all would fit. So the day before the lan I started with removing all the padding and glue. Then I altered the design to get everything right. I took my trusty Dremel tool and started cutting away trying to get it done ASAP. I worked all day till 9pm. Then started the day of the lan around 9:30am and worked on it as fast as I can to get it done by 8pm for the overnight lan-party. Made some more design changes and continued. My 10 year old Dremel was dying since I started the project but thats all I was able to use except for a handsaw that I used for the optical drive. I finally finished around 8:10pm and ran up to my room to test it. It worked! Turned it off and packed up to leave.

I arrived at the church where the lan-party was held at. My friends and the others there were amazed. Thought it was cool. I just can’t believe I did the whole thing in just 2 days. Well a power button was missing but that wasn’t the priority at the moment. Screw driver shorting the pins on the motherboard was good enough.

Flickr photosets: “Briefcase PC mod“, “New PC“, and “Lan Party 4/2-3/2007.”

And at the lan-party.

The guts.

Back.

Side.

(Installing Halo CE for the PC.)

Back on the drugs…

Thats right, I got Linux running on my new PC! AMD Athlon 64 3200+. Not all specs are finalised. My graphics card is some brand that I never heard of but I’ll find out what exactly it is soon. My friend gave it to me and he said it was much better than the one I had.

I choose Ubuntu this time. I’m a fan of Fedora but I heard people were having a few problems lately. I love Ubuntu. Even got an Ubuntu sticker on the front of my PC. I might post some pictures later. I’m just glad to finally have a working PC. Turns out my 512mb DDR ram was bad. Plus had some other stupid problems.

Insanely Funny!

I found this video in a Slashdot comment. All I will say is that it’s a must see for any geek(thats probably anyone reading this).

Is someone plotting against me? PC problems :(

My custom built computer decided to kick the bucket no idea why. After two weeks of testing and swapping parts I gave up.

So I go to my backup PC. A 1.1ghz AMD Duron. Things didn’t go well there either! Decided to do the same crap the first PC was doing. Am I going insane? The only explanation is that someone or something doesn’t want me to use a PC (points fingers at Apple iBook) or that multiple parts don’t work. So I’m gonna have to really work on that. RAM appears to work fine. Video card appears to work fine. All my hard drives are questionable.

What I really want is access to all the media stored on my 60gb HDD. My external HDD enclosure fried months ago. I really want to upgrade my iBook’s 60gb internal HDD to 160gb and toss the old 60gb in a cheap enclosure from eBay.

Donate to the 160gb HDD fund. $139required. PayPal to Legodude522 (at) gmail (dot) com