This one’s darned close to being done now! Here’s some promised pics – computer is now working perfectly, and there’s some room for upgrading. For instance, while the image quality is acceptable (1920x1080 on an onboard VGA connection) I’d like to put a half-height PCI vid card with DVI in there at some point. That’ll require a better mATX PSU, which in turn will allow me to put the P4 3.2GHz processor back in there. All that being said, the Celeron boots up in about 40 seconds or so, pretty fast for a “slow” IDE system. Of course, there’s not a whole lot on there.
My rather…discombobulated setup. That blue screen was as far as it got loading Windows initially. Eventually I got it to boot but it couldn’t detect the USB ports, so no keyboard/mouse. After many failed attempts I did what I’d hoped to avoid – reinstalling Windows instead of using the copy that was already on the drive.
Ugh! This gray goop was responsible for nearly 90 degree C temps on the CPU!! And that was the Celeron!
Oh look, a copper core heatsink. This was entirely invisible before I scraped off the gray thermal crud.
Application of Arctic Silver. Funny how it appears much rougher in one photo than the other. I honestly don’t recall which processor this is, but the Celeron now runs at 40-ish C and the P4, before I gave up on it due to the PSU being too low wattage, ran around 49 C.
Lastly, this is what it looks like now. I’ve gotten everything installed and set up on it, so now all I need to complete it are the PC3200 RAM chips I picked up on ebay last night. The chips currently in this computer will need to go back into my fiancee’s machine now that I’ve got this one all set up.