posted on February 15, 2005 @ 8:15 pm
for valentine's day, i bought owen this:
that's right. i went there. an atari 2600 with 35 games, including donkey kong, pacman, ms. pacman, pole position, and�wait for it�towering inferno. of course out of these 35 games, millipede, a game he loved, wasn't in there. i had to get it separately for $10 when all that crap together was only $76. anyhoo. i told him last night when his present arrived, we should go to macaroni grill cause he's going to think, "man, my girlfriend is so cool i want to feed her cheese ravioli." and that happened, which rocks.
in return, owen's rebuilding hinkypunk jr. hinkypunk sr., you'll recall, is my laptop that died and was resurrected by owen. now he's doing the same for the second. we're discovering emachines are big pieces of crap. not only do they have integraed motherboards (where if your video card goes out, the whole damn thing must be replaced), but also the casing is smaller than usual. therefore, he bought a pretty new case.
Ultimately it turned out that even the power supply has something weird and proprietary going on with it, so I'm going to have to replace that too! Oh well, anything for my dearest Chelsea-kun...
Oh, hey there everyone. This is Owen reporting, since Chelsea's far too involved in playing Atari. Anywho, since I was the one doing it, I thought I'd provide some commentary about the rebuild process. Think of it as "In A Fix, the Computer Edition."
This is the motherboard that was in the eMachines computer. Given how shoddily the thing was designed, I would have done well to use that hammer on it. Actually, I used the hammer to put the port template into place. I sort of bent one of the PCI slot covers in the process (just the covers, mind you, not the slot itself). Whoops. ^_^
"First we'll start with a 'Y' incision..."
Yep, here are both cases with the covers missing. As you can see, the innards of the eMachines computer have already been forcibly removed. Man, I hate getting the freakish heatsink/fan latches off a XP-class Athlon. I've got this nice big red welt on my thumb from the process of trying to get the latch undone. More difficult than undoing a bra, let me tell you! :P
The new motherboard. It's very red. I think it's weird how much importance hardware people are putting on the look of stuff, given that it's going to reside inside a case noone's going to see.
I needed to buy some new screwdrivers for this project. Mr. Kim seemed unusually quiet today.
These are the DVD and CDR drives from hinkypunk Mk. 1. Note how eMachines cast their bastardized influence upon even the drive doors. eMachines, you will pay. Kaaaaaahhhn!
And, in closing, I leave you with a picture of Nevada-tan.
