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- May 24, 2006
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SO my little brother has been using an old toshiba laptop (which he lovingly referred to as his 'crap'top-- Celeron 1.5ghz (400fsb) 1gbram, 80gb hd), to serve music to his stereo and act as a file share on his dorm network to his 360. Ghetto as hell too because the screen didn't work.
Anyway, for christmas I got him an external HD enclosure for the craptop's HD and offered to build him a new computer for just his purposes. Thus, I built his new.... SFF, atom based desktop.
Dare I say Net-top!?
Anywho it was impressively cheap:
For the case I chose the most basic at the egg, as it had good reviews and looked halfway decent:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154084
I had owned an Apex case before (branded as a Dynex back in my BestBuy days) and had been impressed with it's good build quality for the price. Plus the PSU was included, and my bro's system was going to be so low-power it wouldn't matter the brand.
For the CPU and motherboard, the Intel D945GCLF was perfect:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342
Atom included, two SATA ports, IDE, USB, firewire, a PCI slot and a DiMM slot. Don't need much more than that. The funny thing is that the hs with the fan on it on the board is not the CPU, it's the northbridge.
I added 2gb of ram ($17) and a WD 1Tb GreenPower (keep in mind there's room for another HD in there) and a cheap wirelss pci card and for less than $300 (~$250), He had a real nice little system. But what about the OS you say!?
Well that old toshiba was running XP home, and still had the COA sticker on the bottom. So, after a quick torrent of an XP Home OEM Cd .iso, I installed, activated and was good to go. Free OS, legally FTW!
The build went very easy, though there were times I found myself removing a part to plug in another because of the cramped space. Order of installation was important.
It is a testament to the ease of installation that I have NO, Zero NONE, cuts or scrapes.
Nice.
Booting was weird, I got a PXE-G61 or something like that error from the board the first couple of boots, but after fiddling in the BIOS and not changing anything, it works fine. Notice there is no optical drive, as he doesn't need one and can dl/rip whatever he wants on a faster system and send it over the network. I used my external USB-powered LG dvd/cd drive for the installations, which went very fast. Full windows install in about 30min.
All said and done, the FULL installation and build, including error was about 45minutes.
Boot time is approximately 35 seconds on average, with nothing starting but Windows and Comodo antivirus. I will be delivering it tomorrow, I hope he likes it!
Pic:
Top:
Right:
Left:
Anyway, for christmas I got him an external HD enclosure for the craptop's HD and offered to build him a new computer for just his purposes. Thus, I built his new.... SFF, atom based desktop.
Dare I say Net-top!?
Anywho it was impressively cheap:
For the case I chose the most basic at the egg, as it had good reviews and looked halfway decent:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154084
I had owned an Apex case before (branded as a Dynex back in my BestBuy days) and had been impressed with it's good build quality for the price. Plus the PSU was included, and my bro's system was going to be so low-power it wouldn't matter the brand.
For the CPU and motherboard, the Intel D945GCLF was perfect:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342
Atom included, two SATA ports, IDE, USB, firewire, a PCI slot and a DiMM slot. Don't need much more than that. The funny thing is that the hs with the fan on it on the board is not the CPU, it's the northbridge.
I added 2gb of ram ($17) and a WD 1Tb GreenPower (keep in mind there's room for another HD in there) and a cheap wirelss pci card and for less than $300 (~$250), He had a real nice little system. But what about the OS you say!?
Well that old toshiba was running XP home, and still had the COA sticker on the bottom. So, after a quick torrent of an XP Home OEM Cd .iso, I installed, activated and was good to go. Free OS, legally FTW!
The build went very easy, though there were times I found myself removing a part to plug in another because of the cramped space. Order of installation was important.
It is a testament to the ease of installation that I have NO, Zero NONE, cuts or scrapes.
Nice.
Booting was weird, I got a PXE-G61 or something like that error from the board the first couple of boots, but after fiddling in the BIOS and not changing anything, it works fine. Notice there is no optical drive, as he doesn't need one and can dl/rip whatever he wants on a faster system and send it over the network. I used my external USB-powered LG dvd/cd drive for the installations, which went very fast. Full windows install in about 30min.
All said and done, the FULL installation and build, including error was about 45minutes.
Boot time is approximately 35 seconds on average, with nothing starting but Windows and Comodo antivirus. I will be delivering it tomorrow, I hope he likes it!
Pic:
Top:
Right:
Left: