I’ve finally finished my Design Technology A2 project…yes, I am now very tired.

So a little background. basically last year I made a ‘table’. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about that project so this year my teacher suggested doing a scratch build (making a computer case from scratch) because he knew I was into computing and so on. I liked this concept idea that I came up with about being ‘Powered by YM’ – which goes in with the computer processor theme as shown here:

As you can see, it takes the ‘Intel Inside’ concept design used by Apple and but hosts the YM logo.

Here’s the design I came up with for my final case:

Since October/November time I’ve been working on this project (involves a lot of boring folderwork), designing and consulting my client etc. Just to clarify, what I made was a desktop computer case which holds the internal components of a computer – Just like the box you have on your desk.

There is a huge community of people who either do ‘case mods’ or ’scratch builds’ and they share their projects in ‘Project logs’. These are basically full worklogs of making the project from start to finish, complete with pictures documenting the entire process.

You can see my project log here

And here’s a few pictures of the final thing, unfortunately I don’t get to take it home so I can test it in a ‘working environment’ but it’s good enough I guess:

Yes, it is a fully functioning computer fitted with lights and 3 120mm Silent Fans. Check out the worklog for more pictures and how I did it!

Update: Teachers have given me an A

Peace

• 300 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 lead free 7200rpm 16MB ATA133 – Yeah not amazing but surprisingly cheap and it will do the job.
• Exlixir 512MB DDR400 PC3200 RAM – Again cheap and good enough

And of course some blank DVDs and CDs since were there.

Now to make the hard disk transfer. I thought it’d be easy enough to stick the new drive into the new PC, format and install windows from there. Not happening, not matter how much I messed around in the bios I couldn’t get it to run my Windows XP CD. Great. What I usually do when I encounter such a problem is to go for the old skool floppies. Looking at the new pc I realise that there is one flaw in modern day computers and yep – that is the lack of a floppy drive. So I go and rip out a floppy outta another pc I have lying around and connect it up and guess what – it doesn’t work. I then tried the FDD from another PC and had the same result. Multiple attempts and more fiddling in the bios and we’re still at stage one. Remember that this is over a period of hours, and it’s times like this when you really want to give up! It was at this point that I say to someone on MSN, “I hate working in the pre-OS purgatory!”.

So I’m thinking and finally I decided to transfer the HD back to the other PC. Amazing – the CD will not run. Cursing Windows XP we go for the boot disks. Strangely there is some I/O error with the Windows boot up disks but the good old Windows 98 boot disk got me into the command prompt. Using the nasty fdisk tools I partioned and formatted the HD, a few more hours. Thinking that all is good now I transfer back the HD to the new PC, I wanted to install XP from there just to make sure all the hardware is recognised. Boot up and guess what, XP CD works. Great, we get to the stage where you can choose the partition and yes – there is a problem. The new drive was showing as 130GB, that’s half of what it actually is. Figuring it might just be a miscalculation in XP I go through the installation anyway with a quick NTFS format. Booting up into a fresh XP and unfortunately XP wasn’t just being stupid – it still showed as 130GB. Where is the other 170GB?! HD comes out again and into the other PC. Trying the setup in there was no better, XP still showed it as 130GB. Searching on forums was great – really – when people think that all your problems revolve around something being physically damaged it really makes you feel great, especially when your 99% sure that there is nothing broken. So we work around it and finally after like a hundred different things (more hours) we find the culprit – an old XP CD (no service packs) was causing this. I tried another one of our XP CD’s which had come with SP1 and it showed it as a full 289GB. Great, time to get going. We installed XP onto there and we were finally getting somewhere.

Day 3: Well from now on it is more or less straight forward. Well yeah, it would be if you have a CD with drivers on it. Advent (yak) had provided some nasty recovery CD which would only work if you used the recovery console. My dad strongly advised against it from a past experience from that. Ironically the ethernet driver wasn’t even recognised so I had to find that on the other PC and then onto my SD card and into the new PC (i’m loving built in memory card readers). So once were here I’m searching high and low for drivers. It really doesn’t help when the manufacturer of that piece of hardware has a rubbish website with no drivers and it feels like you’re the only one with a ‘Prism’ wireless card. After getting all the drivers, and yes it was a mission, I decided to compile a pack with drivers for anyone with an Advent T9, you can download it here. Finally we got our software installed and sorted out the drives and yes, we’re finally done! Well actually, after finished we tried out our Creative Inspire 6700 speakers on the built in sound (which claims to be 7.1) and we weren’t completely impressed. Convinced that I required the best hardware we moved the great Creative Audigy2 ZS 7.1 card into the new PC (had to move around the exisiting PCI cards how annoying).

And finally Time to sit back and see what we’ve gained:

Yep, and of course there are a few more things like the nifty little case which is a lot more attractive then the big Dell (although admittedly less accessible). The extra ports on the front especially rock, with all of my card readers, audio ports, firewire and USB. Interestingly this PC also has a scart socket in the back. Yeah, I know I might never use it but that is really cool. Other things, the Dell 8200 ran a motherboard with RDRAM. Yeah – that now pretty much obeslete form of memory which is practically non-upgradable (unless you have a few hundred quid). Now with this new PC we have a much easier ability to upgrade the ram up to 4GB. Another problem with the Dell 8200 was that the AGP slot was 4x so it wasn’t making the best use of the graphics card. This one is 8x which is much better. Of course with PCI-Express now the standard that is really the only step left to get this PC into higher action.

And if your interested from the screenshot, we are running the Vista Transformation pack which is really cool (and with this ram it is not much of a memory hog). Time to update the ‘My Rig’ page!

"People have tried modding their iPods using wood before, but it took the genius of ZapWizard to create the Real Wood iPod. Hand carved from a solid piece of African hardwood to a thickness of just 2mm, the end result has to be seen to be believed. Wood grain is the new Apple White!

I’m not gonna lie – I was dead impressed when I saw this, I just wondered if the click wheel actually worked! To see more view the following:

Bi-Tech

I was really hyped up when I started using Xfire – an IM Client which shows your buddies when your playing and what your playing. It has been developed to do much more then that, but I always wondered if that would ever be possible with MSN Messenger. Well now it is, with MSN Application Monitor – a 3rd Party software which allows you to have your personalised message determined by running software.

You can get this from Mess.be, and it has been compiled as a very simple application consisting of only a .exe and an XML file. Its really easy to understand and there has been a pre-programmed interface which is really cool.

For that this app gets a great 85%!

Surfing through case mod sites, the most popular mod you see (besides Lexan windows) is some form of whizzy cooling device, be it fan or waterblock. People go to great lengths to keep their PCs cool.

Now… putting these two things together…

This guy has basically made a computer case out of fans. Very interesting…Hope he doesn’t mind me using just one image! 

Find out more here! 

Egg Frying Made Easy… without a stove

The first week of college my RA gave me a citation violation, "CV," for trying to cook an egg on my portable open-flame stove.

I thought I’d be smarter and I got a George Foreman grill. I decided to be the ass I am… and eat the egg in front of his face. I got another CV, this time calling it "Unsupported electronic device."

Interested in the new way to fry your eggs? Check this out on HighSchoolHumor! 

"Forget fancy watercooled CPUs or complicated heat pipes. Annoyed with the noise of the forced-air cooling in his computer, this guy simply dumped his entire motherboard in an aquarium filled with mineral oil. (coral cache). No modifications were necessary; he even left the fans running to keep the oil moving about. The only thing not submersed in oil is the hard disk."

  Now I really didn’t think that was possible!

 Hope he doesn’t mind me using one of his pics:

 Check out his half english website here

This Madshrimps article is a complete guide to working with dry ice so you can reach sub-zero temperatures with your CPU and graphics card.

he goal of this article is to provide you with an extensive howto on cooling your PC with Dry Ice, including info on where to obtain it and how to build cooling-containers to mount on your CPU and/or GPU (graphics card).

First a little bit of background information on Dry Ice:

• is frozen carbon dioxide
• has a surface temperature of -109F/-78.5C
• has the advantage of sublimation, as it turns directly from solid state to carbon dioxide gas,
• skipping the liquid phase. This is really good as you don’t need a bleeding valve!
• can be obtained in the form of pellets or big blocks which can be easily broken into smaller pieces with a hammer.

Well very interesting, knowing that PC’s are extremely hot when they’re clocking at quite a high rate! See previous posts on Cooling.

Related Links:
Madshrimps [ tutorial ]

“Over the last few weeks I’ve built myself a mobile access point for my car. It’s based on a Soekris net2421 embedded Linux box and uses Verizon’s 1xRTT/EVDO network as its uplink, resharing it over 802.11b. Wherever my car goes, my Internet link goes! I finally put some webpages together on how I built it. The components are pretty cheap and anybody with basic Linux skills can build their own just as easily. I’ve also got it interfacing with Google Maps to do live vehicle tracking via gpsd. It also uploads pictures from an on-board webcam every five minutes or so.”

I really recommend you check out his little site if your interested, this is the future!