It's Coming... The Darkness... It's... it's in
So the project began somewhat haphazardly, because I'm impatient. First thing, I stole the kitchen table, and covered it with parts. Here's the case, lying open like a gazelle, lots of wires and manuals, and the fan housing.
Then I remembered, I need more parts from my old computer...
Poor wee thing, it took so much abuse in the past few years, only to be unceremoniously disassembled in the name of science.
The first thing to do, was install the CPU, Heatsink+fan, and RAM on the motherboard...
The giant silver tower with the fan attached to it is the heatsink contraption. Directly beneath it is the CPU, which you put in with a little levered tray and a laughably inappropriately named "Zero Insertion Force" process. It was very nerve wracking. After you force the tiny, most important, delicate brainmeats of your computer into place, you slather it with Thermal Grease, slather the bottom of the heatsink with same grease, and then mash them together. Four spring-loaded screws through the motherboard later, your CPU is now protected from its own propensity for high heat. According to the Intel website, the MAX allowable temp for my particular model is 72 degrees celcius. Average temp reads on the computer sice I set it up are between 13 and 18 degrees celcius.. I think victory here, is mine.
Here is the case before the motherboard tray is installed, showing the rear of the front face.. The grayish box on the bottom is the hard drive cage, and you can't see it here, but there's a blue LED-lit fan in the front, which is hilarious. Directly adjacent are the six drive bays, with the most awesome tool-less setup ever. Those black panels with the nubs on? Yeah, they clamp onto the drive bays and hold them, freeing me from having to deal with tiny fiddly little screws.
Here's the motherboard tray and the power supply unit installed in the case... The rounded black plastic jammie to the left of the heatsink is the cooling unit attached to my video card, and the two purple flat deals are my RAM chips.
and again...
and once more...
All those fucking wires. I got so depressed just looking at them. But luckily, 9 times out of 10, each wire only fits in one possible location. The yellow/black/red bundles of wires are all power supply cables, the thick beige ones connect various elements of the case to the motherboard (the On button, the Reset button, the little lights that tell you the pc is busy, and the up front I/O ports like USB and mic and so on). The flat red wire is the SATA cable that connects my hard drive to the motherboard. You may be sensing a pattern here in that everything connects to the motherboard. Aaannd I don't know if it's visible in any of these shots, but there's a wide flat black IDE cable connecting my 2 DVD/CDR drives to the motherboard also. These were taken before I remembered to connect my sound card (the card at the very bottom of the case) to the bay, so imagine a flat IDE cable in gray leading up from the bottom to the front at the top. But then you can stop imagining it, because I've taken the sound card out, because I'm pretty sure it's broken.
Anyway... The Dark Fogell's first words! So cute! I wish it had booties I could have bronzed.
Here it is with its fancy/hilarious blue LED, showing off..
Anyway, after some travails, I obtained a copy of Windows XP Pro, got some advice from a few friends, and moved into the installation phase!
First of all, if you get 2 identical optical drives, computers are stupid and can't tell the difference until you have your operating system installed. So when I first tried to install Windows, it couldn't read the disc. What I ended up having to do....
pull the old CD/RW out of my old computer, open the new case, pull out some wires and plug in the old drive. As you can see, I didn't bother installing it properly. But this led to....
SUCCESS!
So on Sunday night, I spend hours and hours installing Windows, updating drivers, updating Windows to Service Pack 2, downloading various programs from the webitubes (firefox, AIM, Gemstone, etc..). I'm still working on throwing in everything I like, but generally, I'm calling this project closed and a success. The Dark Fogell cometh.
I'll muscle my way into the Edit function and post a pic of the final setup tonight. I need some Superbad/Fogell icons...