Technically the very first mod I tried out on my pc was this thermaltake hardcano 11 HDD enclosure I was able to get for cheap off of ebay:
Right after this I installed a new powerbutton as the OEM one (black with blue led halo when on) would get stuck and cause the pc to flip out. This button used to be a horn button for my car steering wheel, but it was repurposed here.
All I had to do was drill a hole, remove the existing power button, re-solder the wires to the new button, and apply the heatshrink to prevent shorts. Adds a cool, custom look. One of the next things I added was a wifi over USB adapter which was a gift from my friend, made by DLINK. I could then browse the web with xp-compatible browsers. Doing so with little cpu performance and ram was slow...
Next I had to reinstall graphics drivers for the Nvidia C51G chip as Half-Life 2 had some strange artifacts in rendering:
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| before fix |
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| after fix |
Then I went to ebay to look for some easy look mods, and found a pair of rosewill 80mm LED fans for cheap.
For now, I only had room for one. A future post will show what I did with the second one. Wiring at this point was incredibly cluttered because of the hardcano. I was also beginning to have frequent stability issues. All signs pointed to this being the original hard drives dying, but I chose to ignore it as I didn't have any spare drives to clone onto. In hindsight, this would have been the perfect time to try cloning these drives. I made a big mistake not doing so.
The holidays were coming up (Nov. 2022), and my focus was shifting back to my car so not a lot was done between then and the new year. I received a GTX 260 and was planning on adding that alongside a thermaltake 430w PSU (according to research recommendations). I made a series of mistakes with this:
- I didn't test the GPU immediately upon delivery, and I disassembled it untested.
- I didn't check the specifications of the PSU, and ended up buying an ATX size one, rather than Micro ATX.
- I didn't properly measure clearances, and bought too big of a card. The card ended up hitting a capacitor on the board, and the capacitor had to be replaced and side-mounted.
The result of these mistakes was a broken GTX 260 and a lot of wasted time. The capacitor on the board was strangely stubborn and was so difficult to remove I ended up having to drill the solder point on the board with a micro drill.
The cable management was really terrible and became even worse after adding the hardcano. It looked like the engine bay of a modern car. The worst part was that I tested it only after assembling everything like this. I tested the card afterwards with various other methods, went through a lot of headache before realizing it was truly dead.
Next post I will be wrapping up this PC's development with the original hard drives.
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