All secure in Sector 15. On perimeter patrol for stray buglets. 100+ markets, 20+ languages, a new #Office. Try it: office.com/try
— craig kerwien (@_craigk) January 29, 2013
Building my PC: plug in and install
After the paint process was completed, I removed the top, side, and front panels from the case, as well as all of the masking tape behind the screens. A quick check around the fully exposed case showed no paint leakage requiring clean up, so I was ready to start plugging everything in.
There are numerous tutorials explaining how to put together a PC in greater detail that I can provide here, so I’ll just summarize the fun key moments. (I recommend the NewEgg videos on YouTube as a starting point if you’d like to build your own rig.)
The CoolerMaster case has a few unique characteristics to work with: there’s a metal flooring specifically for mounting the motherboard, which makes it handy for installing and mountain components outside the case. Once installed, access to the lower part of the case to the power supply cabling is fairly limited, so it helps to plan out your cabling needs before screwing anything in. This includes any wiring to the power supply, hard disk drives, and card reader.
Installation of the CPU cooler fan required an extra to YouTube for a walkthrough. While it’s not technically hard to do, the fitting of the cooler support required fine fitting of screws and angles while not damaging the CPU.
The Silverstone USB 3.0 card reader caused a temporary kerfuffle and a trip to Fry’s: during spec planning, I missed that I would be putting the 3.5″ size unit into a 5.25″ bay, so I needed to pick up a bay adapter. And then once I had the card reader installed, I couldn’t get a CF card fitted into the slot. After a moment of ‘did-I-order-the-wrong-part’ panic, I realized that CF cards go in upside down into the unit. Hm.
The two hard drive slots are hot swap, which made cabling super easy. I connected the Intel SSD first to ease installation of Windows 8. I later connected the WD 2TB drive once Win8 was up and running.
The single hardest part of the install? Moving my data from one big HD to another. Transferring over our home network was easy but slow. I had an Easy Transfer cable left over from the XP-to-Vista migration, the Windows transfer software limits transfer from just one primary hard to another, so I couldn’t just move from my media to the new secondary 2TB drive. I ended up using a portable Seagate 500GB drive as the go-between, and simply copied it from one machine to another using TeraCopy, which is faster than the standard Windows File-Copy process.
Additionally, Windows 8 is humming along nicely, and seems to have settled in well with the new hardware. The latest version of Office runs smoothly, as does Lightroom and Photomatix. I haven’t yet installed the Windows Phone developer tools, that will be a 2013 project.
Overall assessment: mission accomplished. Now let’s see if I can break in that copy of Borderlands 2 I picked up over the holidays.
Building my PC: custom painting the case
Building my PC: Introduction and Parts
It was time to build my own PC: tap into performance boosts with USB 3, 16GB RAM, solid state drive, bigger/faster media storage, and Windows 8. Keep everything affordable. And add a fun custom paint treatment on the case.
Here’s the spec sheet on parts – overall a good solid mid-range machine to be used for photo and video production, app development projects, as well as general productivity with Office, news, and email.
I also used PC Part Picker for pricing and sourcing. It’s a free site. Here’s a link to my build…
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qwsJ
…at the time of ordering, my final cost was just under $1500. I used a combination of Amazon and NewEgg for final sourcing. Prices change all the time in the hardware industry, and PC Part Picker is a good resource for staying on top of the ebb and flow of prices.
A few general thoughts …
- Building a PC is easier than most realize. Most of the time is spent reviewing specs to make sure everything fits together. Should be a de rigueur skill for any self-respecting IT Pro.
- The hardware industry hasn’t quite caught up to USB 3.0 yet. It’s getting there, sourcing the right card reader with case adapter with motherboard with case turned out to be more time consuming than I expected.
- The industry also isn’t there yet on touch screens for desktops. They’ve invested first in All-In-Ones SKUs. I found a few standalone touch screens in the $600 range, which was too pricey for me. I expect this will go down over the next 12-18 months. Meanwhile, I picked up the well rated 24″ Dell.
- I went mid-range with the I5 chip and GeForce 560 graphics card, thinking I’m at the right price/performance value spot.
- The Intel 256GB SSD is for the OS and various apps downloaded from Win8, including the latest version of Office. I’ll use the WD 2TB hard disk for everything else.
And here’s everything on the front porch…
Before I get started with the build, I have to paint the case.
DIY car mount for Nokia Lumia 920
I wanted to try out the new Nokia Drive beta GPS program, and realized I didn’t have a car mount for the Lumia 920 yet. So I quickly taped together two old credit cards, added a fold and hole for the adapter, and put two hooks on the back for mounting on the drink holder. Took about 10 minutes to zap together. You can adjust ‘settings’ to other phones as well.
The mount works securely in traffic. Need to adjust the rubber band so that it doesn’t block the top of the screen where text messages appear.