Topic: New computer assembly with old hard drives (Read 17852 times)

E_Look · « **Reply #140 on:** April 29, 2004, 11:01:46 am »

Well, gentlemen, that's what I had to resort to. The only problem is that on my other system, I seem to have a ground fault or something with the front side USB ports. The system sometimes shuts down, hangs, or reboots if I even touch the metal near the port with a USB connector. Otherwise, I think I'd forget about the Zips these days. I hear you all on this one.

Javora · « **Reply #141 on:** April 30, 2004, 05:35:53 pm »

Quote:

Well, gentlemen, that's what I had to resort to. The only problem is that on my other system, I seem to have a ground fault or something with the front side USB ports. The system sometimes shuts down, hangs, or reboots if I even touch the metal near the port with a USB connector. Otherwise, I think I'd forget about the Zips these days. I hear you all on this one.

Make sure those USB connector wires are installed on the right pins. Crossing wires can fry your motherboard as well as anything that you have connected to the USB port. I would check even if it is a name brand (HP, Dell, etc.), those machines are put together so fast that problems can (and do) occur.

If your not sure, this web site details how the wires should be connected. Hope this helps.

E_Look · « **Reply #142 on:** April 30, 2004, 08:41:15 pm »

The problem is, El Klutzo here put the computer together. Hey, how come they don't file the edges down on all those sheetmetal pieces??!!

I'm going to check your link right now.

E_Look · « **Reply #143 on:** May 01, 2004, 03:08:15 am »

Okay, Javora,

I checked my (individual) front USB port pins and connectors and they were all correctly connected. You know what the problem I think turned out to be? Bad case design- the connectors by the actual front of case USB ports are so close to the metal housing for the ports that the little square openings on the connector that the pins go through might cause shorting, I guess especially if one of the pins is for power. I put a strip of electrical tape on the metal housing by the connector and so far, except for the very first time I tried it, seems to work. That time, it crashed the system, but upon rebooting, this seems to have gone away!

Did my first "case mod" ever- drilled a few holes on the side panel and added an extra fan. Boy, if you're not careful, drilling with the hole cutter mandrel on a loose piece of sheetmetal could either cause the drill to slip and cut your fingers off or cause the sheetmetal to go flying and cut your head off! I should have clamped it down, but I feared scratching the nice paint job, which I did anyway, so, safety first next time! (I actually then held it down on a piece of wood with my knee, which caused a couple of shallow dents that could be seen if viewed a certain angles, but not too bad.

<mutter... mutter... e-tape of all things... mutter>

Capt. Mike · « **Reply #144 on:** May 01, 2004, 06:41:22 am »

There are these things called quik grips, nice rubber jaws, easy on and off. I use them at work to clmp things to the bench. they come in multiple sizes, and well worth the investment.

Glad you got everything going. How's the kid like the new machine?

Mike

E_Look · « **Reply #146 on:** May 02, 2004, 11:53:32 pm »

Heck, I used to use heatshrink tubes all the time. But, and I'm positive you must have seen this before, the leads from the front side USB ports go into this black plastic connector and in there soldered or crimped to their various separate pins. The problem is, there is a tiny square hole in that plastic connector block right in front of the crimped part and some of the pin/lead combinations are just loose enough inside the block that they seem to wiggle a bit if the wire is jiggled a bit. I suspect some of these might "lean" a bit out that little square "window" close enough to the metal USB port housing that there might be some small arcing across to each other. There is NO way to get heatshrink over those areas, even if I pulled out the wire/pin combination, for if I then put the heatshrink over those portions, they might not fit back into the plastic connector block.

Ah, what's one piece of e-tape in a place I'm never going (hopefully) to look at again?!

And as to the case maker- it's Codegen and they don't even make this particular model anymore. I don't think they're the best cases at all; in fact the first thing I did to it was to swap out it's included power supply for a really good one (Antec Truepower 430 W supply), so I don't think highly of any of their stuff. But, I got it as a gift and that does beat having to pay another $25-100 USD for one (personally, I'd stick to the lower end of that price spectrum, later with the looks and pizazz and all that). Oh, that and that the finish is this cool metalflake medium gray (yeah, I've got unhip tastes), so I stayed with it.

E_Look · « **Reply #147 on:** May 05, 2004, 12:51:41 pm »

Capt. Mike-

He LOVES it! He loves the color of the case and lights, the fact that there ARE lights at all (two green LED fans, two red LEDs on the mobo [whatever for, I have no idea], and the two standard LEDs on the front panel, green for power and red for the HD activity.

And, it runs Age of Mythology, Age of Empires, and of course StarCraft. I haven't let him install StarLancer or any of the SFC on it yet... there's enough there to distract him from studying. Maybe this weekend.

It runs fairly cool... I gave him a better case than I've got, so air flow for him is essentially a non-issue. SFC1 will definitely be an issue though, but he likes SFC3 (horrors!) over the other three (though he likes OP, too), probably because it's TNG. He's of the generation that thinks the Captain of the Enterprise is a bald Frenchman.

Oh, of course, there's a cloud around every silver lining- I've got to hunt for the patches and upgrades to the Age of Microsoft games. I don't play 'em myself, so I'm not exactly up on what's out there for them. Age of Mythology and Age of Empires displays halting or "stop-and-go" motion for ground units, even birds in the air and fish in the sea. It CAN'T be CPU or vid card; he's got an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core and a Connect3D Radeon 9500 in there. I'm thinking that it must be that these games need some kind of patch or something from Bill Gates. When he installed A O Myth on my rig, since I have Internet and he doesn't, I think it got automatically updated; on his standalone machine, I guess the software detected that and didn't even bother to display some message telling me I should look for upgrades.

Thanks for asking!

Javora · « **Reply #148 on:** May 05, 2004, 05:15:30 pm »

Age of Mythology and Age of Empires II. Since you didn't specify here is the Age of Empires patch. Hope this helps.

E_Look · « **Reply #149 on:** May 06, 2004, 12:58:39 am »

Javora, thanks. I found those sites earlier tonight via MetaCrawler.

It turns out that these updates for the games made little or no difference!

Rather, it was the driver update (the new Catalyst 4.4 drivers, as someone posted on our forums) for the ATI card that did the trick! And the kid was beginning to suspect that Ol' Pops stuck him with a slow CPU.

BIG EDIT:

And it turns out too that this new updated ATI Radeon driver suite, Catalyst 4.4, almost (say, about 90-95%) fixed the haltingness and herky-jerkiness of SFC1 in WinXP!!!

I tested SFC1 under NO compatibility mode applied, in Win 98 mode, and Win 2000 mode and it's almost like new with no compatibility mode used!! Amazing.

Javora

Re: New computer assembly with old hard drives

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