New Computer Built

If anyone has been keeping an eye on my Flickr account, you may have noticed pictures of my new computer being built have appeared!
They are the best of the ones I took, and unfortunately don’t show every step I took in building the computer.

I started the build on the fourth of March (Tuesday) by fitting the power supply, motherboard, cpu, memory and DVD drive inside the case.
Then on the eighth (Saturday) I fitted the two hard drives, and connected all the cables!

The build went quite well, I brought a few extra bits that I didn’t actually need, but at the time thought I did need! Lol!

I found a few limitations with the case during the build, one of them being the extra hard drive bay in the bottom of the case right behind the power supply, I feel it was a little cramped, and that there was barely any room for the cables coming out of the back of the power supply!

There is practically no cable management built into the case!

And finally the external drive bays, only one side of the case can be opened, which means that only one side of any drive fitted is attached, but there is some support provided to hold the drive up.

There is also the problem of the blanking plates on the front. I found I could not remove the plastic blanking plate from the outside of the case, and I couldn’t push it out from the inside because of a metal plate that had to be broken off first.
Having the metal plate there may help with the cooling, or keeping the system quiet, but maybe there should be some easier way to remove it?

That’s all I have time for in this post, but I’ll post more details when I get another chance!

Till then,
Happy computing!

Finally got the hard drives!

I’ve finally gone and got the hard drives, and DVD drive for my new computer

And here’s a nice photo
Hard drives and DVD rewriter

The photo shows the DVD rewriter drive (top) and the two hard drives (bottom)

The details are:

DVD Rewriter: LG GSA-H66NBAL 20x DVDRW/RAM Black – SATA £13.85
Product Details: (Could not find specific details on website)

Hard Drive #1: 160GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 8MB £24.55
Product Details: http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals& type=harddiskdrives&subtype=spinpointpseries&model_cd=HD160JJ
Hard Drive #2: 500GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 16MB £46.95 (on offer at the time normally £48.95)
Product Details: http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/spec.do?group=computersperipherals& type=harddiskdrives&subtype=spinpointtseries&model_cd=HD501LJ

That’s a total of £89.15 exc VAT
Delivery was an extra £9.95 (I chose a morning delivery)
The VAT came to £17.34
Which brings the total to £116.44

That means that the total price for my new computer comes to £369.78

Now I just have to build it now, that’ll be fun! Lol!

That’s all for this post now!
Till next time!

Linux Rulez…

Cool, its boxing day, and I have managed to make a Christmas present work on Linux with no frustration, and I have setup two other things that I have been putting off for a while.

First to the Christmas present, its a USB 2 8 in 1 card reader/writer with a slot for SD cards, just what I wanted!
Reading the pdf manual on the CD tells me that on Mac OS 10.3 and higher just needs plugging in. One deep breath and its plugged in, check dmesg and it has been recognised.
Plug in the SD card, its put in upside-down (weird!) and a new icon appears on my desktop.
It has been automatically mounted under /mnt/removable
All my files are there. Whoohoo 🙂

The second success is finally getting DVD playback.
I was Stumbling around the web when I came across xinehq.de I’ve already got the player installed, it just didn’t want to play DVDs!
A quick google for libdvdcss, a download of the rpm and its installed
I have now watched the first five minutes of both “The Italian Job” (original) and “Johnny English”

The third and final success is the installation of the Belkin bluetooth adapter that I brought when I brought my PDA, 3 years ago!
I plugged it in, the little blue light stared to flash, and I downloaded BlueZ and managed to scan and make a short, but successful connaction with my PDA.
I also managed to find the computer with the PDA

Phew!
All that and I still managed to cook dinner!