As many intelligent people know, you can give new life to an old computer by replacing its internals. In human terms it would be the equivalen of overhaulin’ a body replacing everything but the bones, and sometimes, even them.
I overhauled an old iPaq desktop computer. I bought this machine five years ago. It was a little nice machine in its time, with a Celeron processor running at 500 MHz. Now it has a nice C3 processor running at 1 GHz. It’s not exactly the fastest machine on earth, but it was the only motherboard I found that was the right size to fit inside the chassis. The machine uses a nice VIA EPIA M-800 with TV Out, both RCA and S-Video, and can play without problems most DivX files. When I overhauled this system I also installed a DVD drive. I choose a laptop drive, because that’s the only space available, and I make a mistake, placing the DVD drive upside down. So instead of opening to the air, it opens to the chassis. Great. Oddly enough, you can still remove the disc without effort, but placing it means you have to put it facing the other side. I’ll fix that later.
I’ll overhaul another computer next. The idea is to place a modern computer inside a Mac Plus chassis. I’ve dismounted it, and saved all the pieces. The idea is to place a computer in the lower part of the chassis, and in the upper side, an aquarium. The size of the aquarium depends of the deepness of the machine: the problem here is that the heatsinks in most modern motherboards are too high to fit inside the Mac Plus: the space available starts at three centimetres high at the front side and lowers to one centimetre and a half at the back side. I am thinking about getting a PicoITX motherboard just for it. Of course, I could drill holes in the chassis, but I don’t want to damage it, in case I want to return the Mac Plus to its original form.
The third computer I’ll mod will be inside a NES chassis. It has the correct side and I don’t mind drilling holes in the backside to plug all the necessary cables. I’m just waiting for a SATA drive to arrive, so I can place the hard drive inside the chassis. If I have enough space and budget, I’ll put a laptop DVD where the cartridge door was.
And that’s for today. Today is a sports day. Just a few minutes ago Spain beated South Africa, three goals to two, and in a couple hours Brazil will beat the USA (I’m pretty sure). Anyway, I gotta go.
See you later.
Dijo.
An atheist, a freethinker, an engineer, and a good man. He loves to write, but sucks at it. And, of course, English is not his mother tongue, but was learned as a second language.
