The place is called Front Sight Firearms Training Institute. The guy who runs it is Dr. Ignatius Piazza, and he’s set up something quite amazing in Nevada.

Why is this the best way to buy a gun? Because not only do you get the gun, but you get the training to go with it. And the training you get from Front Sight is top-notch. You also get a bunch of stuff to go along with your gun (it’s all explained on the page) plus a 30-state conceal-carry license! It’s the best gun deal I’ve ever seen.

To see what Front Sight is really all about, click below and request your free DVD. If you know me personally, ask me and I’ll lend you my DVD (but only if you give it back in a day or two).

Get your free Front Sight DVD here:
https://www.frontsight.com/store/freedvd.aspx

It’s a double-wide card. Even though it only plugs in to one high-speed PCI (x16) slot, it’s so wide that it takes up two slots. This is one of the reasons why I chose the particular motherboard that I did. It’s got room for two of these bad boys. Actually, technically, it can take four, but four double-wides like this one won’t fit.

Yes, those are heat-pipes. This is why it’s double-wide. It’s got heat fins and heat pipes all over the place, and the fan there blows all the heat straight out the back. Nice design, good cooling.

Here’s some info on overclocking this card without buying anything else, but just using the onboard fan:
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=580

It’s installed, the case side panel is on, the side panel case fan is on (and glowing blue, but soon to be red), and all lights are all on in nifty glowy red goodness. You can see the lights on top of the RAM near the top.

Here’s a better shot, pulled-back a bit more so you can see the whole case. Oh yeah, my new game machine kicks ass. And this new ATI Radeon HD 4870 kicks some serious ass, too! Those red cold cathodes are so bright that they light up my room at night. Who needs a night-light when you’ve got a kick-ass gaming machine with evil-red cold cathodes?

Up next: New CPU cooler with evil-red fan.

Yet another view of the new cool game machine goodness. You can see the red cold cathodes fixed to the front and bottom of the case. The power box is right next to the one on the bottom, near center, right next to the speaker. This power box powers both cold cathodes.

Here, my new game machine is plugged in, but not yet powered up. Still, the thing has glowing power and reset buttons right on the motherboard! Is that cool or what? I don’t even need to plug it in to a case to turn it on! I love this mobo!

Life! This is a comparison shot between my linux server (green) and the new gaming machine (red). Yes, the linux server was always intended to be green. And yes, the game machine was always intended to be RED. It’s designed for destruction, after all! Destruction of my enemies (both AI and human alike). Muaa aah aaahhh! (evil laugh)

Neither case has the left-side panel installed at this time. The fans are blue because that’s the only option with this case, so I’ll have to get some green and red fans later on.

You may also notice the new high-speed gaming RAM has two little rows of lights on ‘em, red and green! I didn’t even know this when I got it. It’s so cool , they change and flicker with activity! Yes, I also put in a DVD burner drive; how else will I install all my games?

I use the motherboard box to store all the miscellaneous stuff such as cables, adaptors, manuals, screws, unused hardware, etc., when putting together a new system.

Next: New, kick-ass video card.

Good movie, but I don’t want to see it again.

Why? Because my favorite character died in the end. But if you like action sequences, it’s full of ‘em. And the action sequences are good.

Speaking of action sequences, the T-800 is one tough cookie… but stupid. The only thing keeping the T-800 from killing you is distance. Once it gets a hold of you, you are done. But not in this movie; if you throw everything you’ve got at it and it just keeps on coming, what does it do to you once it gets a hold of you? It throws you across the room, of course. This puts more distance between you and it, thus giving you more time to figure a way to defeat it. If the T-800 really wanted to kill John Connor, it would have simply walked up to him and killed him. Instead, it walked up to him, grabbed him, and then tossed him away. See? Stupid.

There were the standard lines, such as, “I’ll be back.” and “Come with me if you want to live.” Hey Hollywood, how about some creativity?

They show where/how John Connor got his facial scars. They show how Kyle Reese learned the rope-through-shotgun-stock trick.

Watching the previews, I remember hearing John Connor saying something like, “One way or another, this war ends tonight.” At the end, you heard him say something like, “Skynet’s global network is still operational…” I was thinking, “Well, there were a lot of good action scenes, but what was accomplished?” Because of that last line, the war is not over, the preview lied to me, and now there is yet another opportunity to make another movie with little creativity.

I will not be buying this one, unless I can find it used for $3.

And here I’m holding the CPU power connectors so that you can see the label. Nice, eh? I love this power supply.

And these little guys… I think this is a huge leap forward. I LOVE these little connectors!

You take the individual case connectors, in this case, the USB connectors, and plug ‘em in to this little blue thing. This little blue thing is labeled on all sides, it’s just brilliant. Once they’re all in there, just slide the whole thing down on to the motherboard! Saves my back!

I love modern technology!

I have a lot of respect for you. I think you’ve done amazing things with Amazon.com. Indeed, truly remarkable things. When idiot investors were walking away from your presentations, you were creating the amazing future which eventually became Amazon.com.

Example: You started Amazon.com as a book store, then just took it to the moon. Outstanding!

Example: Amazon created wish-lists. I don’t know if y’all were the first, but amazon.com was the first site I found that did wish-lists. This made it easy for me to keep track of the items I was saving up for.

Example: Amazon One-Click. It’s very convenient, fast, and easy to set up. Makes shopping on amazon.com a cakewalk! No one else did that, and not many other sites do that now either.

Example: Amazon Associates. Made it possible for me to have an online bookstore without the actual bookstore (or moviestore, etc.).

Example: Amazon Marketplace. I’m not saying eBay hadn’t hit the mark first, but you guys there did a bank up job on the Marketplace and I still find amazing deals there, when I don’t want to pay full price, or when it’s out of print.

Example: Amazon MP3. I like being able to buy the songs that I like on an album, instead of being forced to buy the whole thing. In the past, I have purchased CDs for just one song on the disc. The downloaded MP3 is high bit-rate, and not DRM’ed. This is a big point, as I can put it on any of my audio player devices (like my phone).

Example: Amazon Unbox. I just may use Unbox for all my video purchases. I’m kinda undecided on it, but it’s still intriguing. I can buy a movie and start watching it within about 10 minutes (sometimes less) right on my big-screen computer. Nobody beats 10-minute shipping. Plus, it’s there for me forever (can’t lose it); that’s a big plus.

And finally… The Amazon Kindle. Wow! I love it! I just LOVE IT! This is the device that I want all my stuff on. This is the one. It’s just the right size, in my humble opinion, because I can slip it into my side pants pocket (even with the cover on). I love all it’s features, except the DRM’ed books. I can only read ‘em on the device, not anywhere else; that’s a minus.

From my perspective, it looks like you are giving us people/consumers what we want. I think this is exactly the right thing to do. How do you know what we want? Do a survey. Doing surveys with enough people will give you a very accurate picture of what we want.

In a Charlie Rose interview with Marc Andreessen (creator of Netscape), Marc spoke about the Kindle. He said something like, “Oh, Kindle, I mean, it’s just–it’s gigantic.” He then went on about form factors… “The iPhone with a sort of three or four inch screen… a laptop or netbook with a 12 or 14 inch screen… and now you’ve got the Kindle with a sort of seven inch screen.” He and Charlie Rose go on to talk about others making a bunch of little “pads”, or “net pads”… Marc continues: “Somebody will figure it out. That thing, I mean, the Kindle does books and magazines and newspapers, but that form factor and that shape of a device and that weight in a couple of years is going to be doing video, it’s going to be doing music, it’s going to be doing video conferencing. It’s going to be doing telephony. It’s going to be doing Web browsing. It’s going to be doing everything, right? And so that’s the next — one of the fascinating things is that’s the next screen size and the next killer device, I think, is what’s going to happen.

In a recent interview, you were asked about putting other media (such as video) on the Kindle, and you said something like, “Would you use a Swiss-army knife at the dinner table?”

Actually, I would. But that’s because I’m a geek. And I have used a Swiss-army-knife-style spoon-and-fork thingy for eating a whole meal. It worked quite well, no problemo.

Anyway, here’s my point: I (the consumer) want a device just like the Kindle, which can do e-books (just like it does now), play my MP3s (with all the features of an iPod), full color e-paper, play movies (e-paper is almost there, you can watch demos on YouTube of video-capable e-paper now), with a big SSD (Solid State Disk) to hold my entire library (of everything, audio/video/ebooks/PDFs/etc), two additional SD card slots for my own SD cards, wireless access to the internet (just like it does now), GPS services (just like it does now), longer battery life, and a good internet browser for web surfing & email (such as Mozilla Firefox). You could even hook it in to Amazon Unbox and sell me movies directly to my Kindle. Cha-ching!

I would pay a lot for a device that did all that. I’d bet others would, too.

Cell phones come close, but they’re too small to read whole books on (plus they don’t use e-paper), and they’re also too small for movies/videos. The best a cell phone has going for it is that it’s already networked. I can do a lot with my little flip-phone: web, Gmail, Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, texting, IMs, take pictures (and post them to Flickr), listen to my MP3s with sterio Bluetooth headphones, and so on, but it’s not a good e-book reader, and it doesn’t have a fast-enough processor for video.

Now, let me go back a step, back to before there was a Kindle. Sony had a pretty good e-book reader, but it wasn’t networked, you needed to have a computer to put the books into it, there were not a lot of e-books available for it, and it cost a friggin’ arm and a leg.

I would bet I could not have convinced anyone to put any money in to a project to create a cute little e-book reader which used e-paper, ran for days/weeks on a single charge, was networked (for free), had a deal with a big book-seller such as Amazon.com for all of it’s content, ran on a free, open-source operating system (Linux), and did all the other things (such as note-taking) that the Kindle does… and make it affordable. No way, bub. I would have been laughed at, all the way out the door.

Then Jeff Bezos creates and releases the Amazon Kindle. Bam!, now it’s possible. Before that, it was not within the realm of possibility. Now that it’s been released, the Kindle has shown that such a device is actually possible… and is really what people want.

NOW I could convince someone to make such a device. Indeed, I could convince someone (with money) to invest in a project to create the all-my-media-needs device described above, the one which is fully networked over the existing Sprint wireless network, portable (with long battery life), color e-paper, full-motion video, MP3/music player, with lots of storage, web browsing, email, VoIP, everything.

Google may already be working on such a device. Google has money to throw around, and they’ve got talent as well. Just look at what they did for cell phone operating systems with Android. They’ve also got a huge e-book project already in production, and one for the iPhone & G1.

The guy who owns that big news network, Rupert Murdoch, he’s got money to throw around. And he loves the Kindle. I’d bet he’s working on a device to do what you, Jeff Bezos, won’t let the Kindle become.

Let the Kindle fulfill it’s destiny. Create an API for it and let people play around inside it and create with it (just like Google’s Android OS for cell phones).

If you don’t, you will lose the market to devices which do what we want them to do, not necessarily what you want them to do. And if you lose the market, your dream of “everything ever printed available in the Kindle” will not happen.

Thanks for your time.

-Hawk
Humble Kindle owner

The Motherboard is an ASUS M3A79-T DELUXE, AMD 790FX chipset, ATX form factor, 4xPCI-E(x16) / 2XPCI / 4XDDR2, SATA2 RAID, 1GB lan, 1394 (firewire), lots of USB 2.0, and amazing audio capabilities. CPU type: AMD Socket AM2.

Power supply and motherboard installed in the case. I popped out the connector plate which came with the case, installed the one that came with the motherboard, and it all fits perfectly!

The RAM installed in the motherboard, and the CPU is ready, along with the CPU heatsink & fan.

The RAM is a CRUCIAL 4GB KIT (BL2KIT25664AL80A), high-speed gaming RAM set.

I like this motherboard because I can simply add two more 2G RAM sticks and double it. I’m not saying Windows XP will be able to use it (as of now, not all of my 4G is used), but I can expand it easily. This ease of expansion is important to me.

CPU installed. It went in easy as pie.

The CPU is an AMD ATHLON X2 7750 2.7G – Black. It was just under my pricepoint for this system. I can always upgrade.

And finally, the CPU heatsink & fan. Now I almost have a working computer.

I’ll probably replace this heatsink & fan with the kind I’ve got in my linux server; it looks like a tower of heatfins with a fan on the side.

Most of this stuff has been discontinued, but you can find suitable replacement components at mwave.com

So far, so good! More to come.

I asked them to add a domain name to my friend’s virtual hosting account, and they were like, “Eh?” I very carefully explained to them (all of them were in Portugal) how to add a domain name to a website. It’s trivial, I do it all the time. No, I’m not transferring a domain, no, I’m not registering a new domain; the domain is already registered and pointing to the correct IP address. All they need to do is add the name to the account and the website will show up.

Nope, they don’t do that. I would need to upgrade to a goddamn dedicated server account in order to do that.

Just now, I logged in to my GoDaddy account and added about 40 domains to my virtually hosted account. As expected, it was trivial! Why can 1 & 1 not do this? Because they’ve got their heads up their asses! That’s why.

Stick with GoDaddy, they allow you do to trivial things with your virtually hosted websites without upgrading to a full-on dedicated server.

And, on the topic of dedicated servers, I recommend serverbeach.com.

Here’s the new power supply. It’s a 700W, which should hold me for at least a week, maybe even two. The maker is called “be quiet!”, believe it or not. And with a huge 120mm fan, it’s pretty darn quiet. The type is called “STRAIGHTPOWER”, and it’s got enough cables and connections to power anything I may put in this machine (for a very long time). Most of the connections are labeled with colorful pictures of where they go (which is just nice of them).

This is the case. Yes, it’s the exact same case as my linux server.

I like this case. It’s clear acrylic by Logisys. It’s big enough for whatever I may need to put in it. It’s easy to work on. It’s clear. Did I mention that it’s totally clear acrylic? Way-cool.

This case comes with three small blue fans: one in front, one in the side, and one in back. They are lit by four blue LEDs, one in each corner. No, there is no option for green, nor for red. I’ll eventually have to replace them all with red fans, but they are still cool as-is.

I don’t know if they still have these items, but you can find most of this stuff at mwave.com and frozencpu.com. Mwave beats just about anyone else on price, and FrozenCPU specializes in all kinds of stuff for tricking out your computer big-time. That’s where I got the cool red cold cathodes from (in subsequent posts).

More to come.

My Game machine (Windows) provides: Games, Movies, Music, and Internet.

My server (Linux machine) also provides Movies, Music, and Internet, but to a lesser degree Games because there are more developers making games for the Windows platform than for Linux. For example, it was really nice (and surprising) to see Savage 2 run straght away in Linux, right after installation. That was cool. But there is no Call of Duty for Linux (booo!).

More and more, I’m not using my DVD player + my TV; I’m using my computers. I use my game machine to watch movies I’ve got on DVD as well as TV shows on DVD, and also movies I’ve purchased from Amazon Unbox. I actually really like Amazon Unbox. I buy a movie for $15, and it’s always available from their server. This makes it “un-loseable”. I can’t lose it. I can always lose a DVD. However, I can lend a DVD to a friend, or I can take it to a friend’s house and watch it there. It’s tough to do that with Amazon Unbox.

I’ve been buying lots of MP3s from Amazon, especially when I don’t want to buy the whole album. For example, I got Tomoyasu Hotei’s Battle Without Honor or Humanity, and skipped the rest (for the most part).

Then I back up the MP3 file to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) using Jungledisk.

I also watch stuff online, from sites such as Hulu.com. There was a way to watch live TV streamed across the internet, but I’ve not researched that recently and don’t much care. It was really crappy quality. So I just buy the TV shows and watch ‘em on my computer.

I don’t even need my regular DVD player and TV anymore. And when I upgrade my monitor, I’ll be able to watch things in hi-def. This seems like a much better investment than a plasma TV. Why? Because my computer can do much, much more than a plasma TV (like hi-def games!).

I’m moving away from the traditional way of watching a movie or a TV show… by not using my TV and instead using my computer.

I’m moving away from the traditional way of listening to music (CD player, tape player, LPs, etc) by using my computer.

I don’t even buy dead-tree books anymore. I buy only books for my Amazon Kindle.

My computers have become the center of all things entertainment in my life. And a big part of this change involves Amazon.com.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/722

This add-on is so successful at protecting your browsing session, it has won security awards. See the link above for all the details.

Here’s the jist: Install it, restart your browser, then browse the net as usual but keep an eye on the little blue S icon in the lower-right corner of the browser. When you hit a webpage which doesn’t seem to operate as it should, click the little blue S icon and start allowing sites/domains to run javascript. Each time you enable one, the page will re-load. You can then test the functionality of the page again, and if it’s still not working, enable another site/domain and try again.

Here’s a brief example with YouTube:

When I first installed NoScript, all javascript was disabled. So when I go to YouTube, the videos don’t play and I get a little complaint in the video section about not having the Flash plug-in installed. I do have the flash plug-in installed, but it’s the javascript which determines what kind of browser I have and then loads the appropriate Flash code.

Here we are at Mike Adams’ YouTube channel. This guy is my hero. In this example, I’m trying to watch one of his videos on the evils of vaccines. However, the video isn’t loading and playing.

First, click the little blue S icon in the lower-right corner of your browser. A list like this popups up:

See how the one on the bottom, youtube.com, is bold? That’s the one you should enable first.

So click on Allow youtube.com and watch the page reload.

Still, however, the video isn’t loading and playing. Click the little blue S again…

The only other site to allow is ytimg.com. I believe this is an image/movie server for youtube (I think).

So click on Allow ytimg.com…

There, now the video is loading and playing. No sweat.

The danger comes in allowing hostile sites. What is a hostile site? It’s a site which intentionally attempts to infiltrate your computer via your browser. If you’re running IE (Microsoft Internet Exploiter), then you’re kind of a sitting duck and you will get infected eventually.

If you’re running Firefox/Seamonkey with Adblock Plus and NoScript installed, you’re virtually bulletproof.

“But Hawk, how do I know if it’s a hostile site?” you may ask.

Well, ya kinda gotta be geeky about it. You’ll have to look at that domain, that website, and make a decision about it. Does it look like a good site? Or is it trying to do wierd things? Does it have a banner ad which reads, “Click here for a FREE virus!”?

I usually will not allow anything on a site that I’m unfamiliar with. I also don’t go looking for trouble browsing wierd sites in the dark allys of the net. But if I did, I would not be too worried about it; I’d just leave everything disabled in NoScript and surf cautiously.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/1865

Example: Here’s Yahoo Mail in IE (Microsoft Internet Exploiter):

Big banner ad at the top and some little thumbnail-type ads along the side. Here’s Yahoo Mail in Seamonkey with Adblock Plus installed:

http://www.jact.com/

No, it’s not too good to be true. Yes, it’s almost too good to be true. Yes, it’s a friggin’ dream come true!

In a nutshell: Sign up for an account (they are in beta at the time of this post), download and install the client, play your game as you normally would, earn points (called BUX) during gameplay, then cash ‘em in for stuff.

Here, all your questions are answered:

http://www.jact.com/faq.php

After reading this book (twice!), it almost seems like it’s time for another revolution.

Many of the reasons why we broke away from the rule of the King seem to be happening again now, right here in our own land.

This is a good reason why you should get and read this book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbCNSc3YVg4 American Government Test

• Adobe’s installer failed miserably.

When I popped the CS3 DVD in my system at work and fired up the installer, it gave me a small window with a floating piece of paper. The floating piece of paper sailed across the little window, from a folder on the left to a folder on the right, then it repeated. While this floating paper animation was flying, a progress bar below was creeping. Once the progress bar was full, the little window disappeared. And that was the end of the installer. The installer never did launch. I waited a long time for the installer to launch, and I ran it many times, but the installer never did come up.

I called Adobe tech support on this issue. I spoke to a very sharp, very nice, very patient guy named Robert. We ran through so many things, so many procedures, to fix this. And we were just guessing as to what the problem was. We tried turning off all startup programs, we tried putting the entire contents of the DVD onto the hard disk, we checked the system logs. we edited specific XML files, and we rebooted the system many times during all this. Finally, we stumbled upon the solution: he had me download a utility from Adobe. This utility was designed to repair Adobe installation problems. It did all kinds of things, like back up the registry, clean out temp directories, check files… and so on. The utility fixed the problem.

Getting all this “Adobe installer” stuff worked out and handled took the better part of one business day. That’s a lot of lost time just to handle a really crappy installer. In all my years playing with computers, I have never had the frustration of working with such a low quality installation program. By the way, we also had to turn on the Flexnet service. I’m just guessing that this was yet another failure of the installer.

• Adobe’s phone system failed for part of a day.

I was working with our vendor on a different problem; the serial number we got didn’t work. Our vendor tried to call Adobe to get some help but Adobe’s phone system was down. It was resolved the next day. More time lost.

Now, having said all that, I must report on the rest of Adobe’s products. Overall, Adobe’s products work very well. I have been using Dreamweaver for a few weeks now, and it has not crashed on me. I have been using Flash Video Encoder and it has only failed me on two movies thus far (requiring us to buy additional software to make up for Adobe’s failure).

So, overall, Adobe’s products have been working and working well. The fiasco with their installer really amazed me, and wasted a lot of time.

Mistake. Yes, that was a mistake. I don’t know why I keep on falling for such things. Maybe one day I’ll learn.

Anyway, I got the new 007 movie and I got the coupon. So here I am now, looking to use this coupon and get my free DVD. Here’s a picture of it. I’ve rubbed out any numbers which may be significant and added a subtle red arrow pointing to the price. With this coupon, I can get any selection with a price of $21.95 or less.

Okay, that’s cool. Now let’s go check out the Columbia House website!

Notice how EVERYTHING is $22.95? Those sale prices in red only take effect when you first buy something at $22.95.

My nice little coupon here is friggin’ worthless! What can I buy with it? Nothing!

I’m going to cancel my Columbia House account just as soon as I can find a use for this goddamned coupon. Then I’ll just stick with amazon.com. They treat me right.

At this point, I still had the original heat sink and CPU fan. Later on, I swapped it out for a better one. More on that later.

It’s almost a new machine! I just need to add some power and I’ll be ready to boot it up for the first time. Also notice the position of the RAM; I started with it in the first two slots, the yellow ones. Later on, while I was debugging (what I thought was) a RAM problem, I moved ‘em over to the two red slots. More on that later.

The name of this movie says it all! And I knew I wanted to see it as soon as I saw the billboard. I didn’t even see a preview. All I knew was: 1) starred Clive Owen, 2) starred Paul Giamatti, and 3) is called “Shoot ‘em Up!” And that’s good enough for me.

Now, if you get queasy watching people get shot or blown away, then this is not the movie for you. If you get annoyed that there is a gun shot between every other sentence, then don’t see this movie. And if you do see it, be prepared to learn what Mr. Hero really hates, because he’s going to tell you whether you want to hear it or not.

A possible alternative for the name would have been, “Body Count”. It seems that there are an endless number of bad guys who are just begging to get shot. And they’re all really, really bad shots!

Our Mr. Hero, on the other hand, is one bad-ass mofo who kicks ass all over the place. He kicks ass effortlessly, even while doing other things such as helping pregnant women give birth… and even having sex.

I laughed my ass off through this movie. I thought it was great. Why? Because it doesn’t take itself seriously. For example. when our Mr. Hero escapes from a huge batch of bad guys, the lead bad guy says, “My god, do we really suck, or is he really that good?!” Which I thought was one of the best lines in the whole movie.

I’ll probably buy it when it comes out. Sigh… You know… It’s tough to find such high quality fantastic fun gratuitous violence these days. Well done, Michael Davis, and keep it fun! Give me more! More!

The processor is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+, and it also kicks ass. See that CPU fan? That came with it, and the CPU came pre-installed on the mobo because I paid an extra $10 to have it assembled and tested before shipping it out to me. BUT… that CPU heat-sink & fan is not the one I’m using now. More on that later.

Here it is installed into the case. I put insulator washers on both sides of the motherboard, just to make sure it was a good, snug, isolated fit. When one builds his own computer, one can use as many insulator washers as one pleases. As mentioned in the [previous article](http://jedihawk.com/hawksblog/?p=158), the connector backplate doesn’t fit, so I left it off.

Here’s one stick of the Crucial RAM, BL12864AA804 Ballistix 240-pin DIMM DDR2-800 PC2-6400, Unbuffered, non-ecc. I got this as part of a “kit”, meaning two sticks of 1Gb RAM sold together in it’s own cute little box. This is good because you need two sticks of RAM to take advantage of the “dual channel” feature of my mobo anyway. I got this from mwave.com also.

More to come.

Anyway, here’s my new case. It’s a Logisys clear acrylic CS888CL case, and I got it from frozencpu.com.

The only problem I had with it was when I tried to install the motherboard with the motherboard’s own connector backplate; it didn’t fit. At first I thought it was a problem with the case. I thought the mobo standoffs were too tall (a standoff is the cylindrical screw-receiving connector which holds the mobo to the left side of the case). Then I learned it wasn’t the case that was out of alignment, but the mobo’s own connector backplate. It was about 5mm off. I know the case isn’t to blame because the video card seated perfectly.

So I just left the connector backplate off and all is well.

There are two main types of connectors used in holding this case together: the L-shaped metal connector, and the cubical acrylic + metal threads connector. I think the L-shaped connectors should all be replaced with the cube-type; they’re much better and much more solid. The L-shaped connectors bend easily with your fingers. On the plus side, only the cube-type connectors are used when good structural support is required.

I’m very satisfied with this case and would recommend it. But I’d recommend you get it from xoxide.com, they’ve got lower prices than frozencpu.com and they’ve got a fantastic support forum.

More to come.