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It just occurred to me that, although I have mentioned my exciting little Mac Laptop, I have said little about my very blue PC. Since there’s a story to go with it, I suppose I’ll blog on it this (very early) morning.

My first build was a silver case with blue lights all over it, and a window into the mess of cords that made the inside. For those interested, I used an Aspire X-Plorer Silver with several Cold Cathodes as well as some LEDs, and even some handles with LEDs in them. The ‘feet’ of the computer flashed blue in multiple patterns. I also had a multipurpose front panel which glowed blue.

Alas, that one was stolen. I left it in my teacher’s class room during school (I was going to a LAN party after). I thought it was locked, but I really didn’t even think about it. I never expected someone to steal something from a teacher’s closet! They took the computer, the monitor, and the box of games, keyboard, and mouse! They just left my pillow sitting there. Needless to say, the cops could do nothing (have they ever done anything?) even though I knew precisely who did it.

So a while later (after suffering with a Dell Craptop) I got a surplus of money due to my birthday, and used it to build my new beast. This one I still have. The cords are not nearly as messy! I had the wiring professionally done. I’ve still got blue all over the place, but now I’ve got an Aspire (now Apevia) X-Plorer Silver which has two built-in lights running down either side of the front. It even has a blue-lighted temperature monitor ont he front, just above the USB ports and an unfortunately non-functional firewire port. It’s also got a beautiful glass-looking door (though it’s plastic). It pulls together so nicely with my glass desk and bookshelf. I also got a 20″ widescreen monitor this time.

Another new feature is the fan/light control on the front. Now I can turn most of my lights off! However, there are a few that stay on. The front two lights do, because for some reason they won’t work at all when hooked up to the switch. The temperature monitor stays on, glowing brightly, because otherwise it won’t read my temps at all. I might hook that one up, though, to one of my night switches. The side fan does not go off because every time I got into the computer I would have to open both sides, and that’s just not practical. I might replace that fan with a non-LED one. And finally, the heatsink fan does not go off because if for even a few seconds my heatsink fan went off, my CPU would be likely to fry and render my machine completely useless.

Now, the innards are the really exciting part. I used to have a gig of RAM. Now I’ve got two gigs. Used to have a 160GB HDD, now the hard drive is a whole 200 precious gigabytes! My graphics card is the same, the motherboard is actually a little worse, but I now have a DVD Burner (silver to match case) as well as a floppy drive. However, the floppy drive does not work, as there is a loose cord stuck between the floppy and the front insertion point, which I have been too lazy to fix since I NEVER use floppies.

Best of all are the final three parts. I now have a far better power supply. The one I had before actually went off periodically; This one can handle all my crazy blue light action!!! Also, my processor is a sweetly awesome Socket AM2 4600+ X2 (Dual Core) Athlon 64!!! Before I had a regular 3000+ (non-Dual Core). This computer actually originally had a 3500+, but I bought the new proc when the price came down from like $900 (yes, for the little itty bitty chip and a crappy heatsink which I didn’t use anyway) to only $250. Then I sold the old one on eBay. I also got a Zalman Tempest CPU Cooler!!! It’s wicked sweet looking, and it cools my system really well.

When I was installing the new heatsink, I actually bent a few pins on the expensive proc and had to bend them carefully back into place. That would have sucked badly, my friend!

Anywho, just about time I be getting to sleep. My eyelids are shutting on me. Perhaps more on the computer later (almost surely). I’d like to post some pics when I’m not so tired as well. Sorry for the lack of graphics here :-/