paging SimonK (was OT cooool computer or whatever)

re: this Shuttle you flogged me.

I've replaced the power supply with a SilentX one, replaced the main
case fan with a NoiseBlocker UltraSilent one, and yeah, it's really a
lot quieter than before - in particular you can't hear the main fan
stepping up and down, which was the irritation before.

That fucking Northbridge fan still makes quite a bit of noise - how
confident are you that it's OK to replace the fan with a heatsink? My
concern is that there's very little free space inside the box for the
heatsink to actually dissipate it's heat...

 

Cool, thought it might improve things

You can run with neither heatsink nor fan if you're not using the on board
graphics, but a heatsink should be fine for normal use. I seem to remember
that I put one in my new one, but I can't be arsed to take the lid off just
now ...

http://forums.kustompcs.co.uk/showthread.php?t=16468

 

it's really much much quieter - you couldn't actually hear the
northbridge fan over the whoooo--whooooh noise of the case fan ramping
up and down responding to CPU temperature. I've also put a near-silent
Barracude hard-drive in it, and that doesn't make much noise at all -
even giving it a full format didn't make it make a noise, and there's
never any tick-tick-ticking even when recording one video whilst
playing another.

I am using the onboard graphics, including the TV-out (which, finally,
*finally*! I managed to get working in composite out, rather than
s-video, and so although I wasted 20 dollars on a silly cable from the
states, means I've got a decent TV picture for DVD playback).

TBH it's not *that* loud, it'd just be nice having made the effort to
get the cpu and case fan nice and quiet to have the machine as near to
silent as possible. The power supply and fan were easy to swap - doing
the Northbridge appears to need a lot of disassembly of the box, and
probably re-routing some cables. I'll probably get around to it
eventually though.

smashing, ta.

 

I already have a Zalman northbridge heatsink - it's just such a pain in
the arse to fit it[1] that I haven't done it yet. The box is a Shuttle
case - there isn't space to fit a standard sized power supply.

the box doesn't need to be completely silent - just pretty quiet. It's
a living room media-centre style PC, and the room it sits in is rarely
occupied without the TV being on, so it just needs to be quiet enough
to be inaudible in comparison to - say - fairly quiet movie dialogue.

 

<snip>

On the subject of Shuttles...

I pulled the case off mine, and found that it does have two HDD drive
bays. One is in the 'normal' fore<->aft orientation. The 2nd one is
slung under this bay, in a left<->right direction. The 2nd bay is
suspended to the main bay using some interlocking stud gizmos that
slot into groves on the bottom of the main bay. Dunno if you can
order this bay/carrier separately.

I also fitted the gen-u-ine shuttle wifi card. What a fucking pain in
the arse that was! The instructions don't match the chassis/mobo I
have *at all*. There's a daughterboard supplied who's sole purpose
seems to be to convert from a 5-pin USB cable from the wifi board to a
9-pin cable that connects to the mobo. However, the internal USB
ports on my mobo are 5-pin anyway - I only realised that I could plug
the board straight in and ignore the daughterboard after extended web
searching. And, there's nowhere on the chassis to suspend the card
that I can see - I've got it held in with one screw. And once
installed and drivers loaded, it was piss poor at picking up a signal.
And then crashed the machine with a driver error. Twice.

Still, onward and upward. In the new year I'm going to bend your ear
for info on setting up the PVR software. As a kick off, are you
running XP Home or XP Pro?

 

doubt it. They're all different. Mine's pretty much the "original"
design, and yours is very modern - they've probably done a lot of
optimisation in case layout since mine. I *could* put a second drive
where the floppy should go, as I've no need for a floppy drive (who
has, FFS).

[snip]

Well, that little tale makes me pretty happy I decided to go for the
external USB wifi route. It took 2 minutes to install, 30 seconds to
type in the WEP key, and bingo - "high connection strength, 54Mbps
connection speed" straight away, despite there being a ceiling and
floorboards between the machine and the base station.

XP Pro. And using GB-PVR for recording/playback and XMLTV (oh, and a
batch file and a scheduled task) for programme scheduling. And
Intervideo WinDVD for - duh - DVD playback.

I still haven't found a RF wireless keyboard/mouse I like, though.

 

Have you tried the Logitech stuff?... I have a set that is surplus to
requirements (keyboard and optical mouse combo), and could be yours for a
small consideration...

 

what's the range on it like?

Ideally, I need a 3-4m range...

 

Gyration supposedly make some of the best cordless keyboards/mice - up
to 100ft range and the mouse works in mid air. Not in my price range
though.

http://www.gyration.com/mcrsuite.htm

 

How does the mouse hover then?

 

v.nice.

Way too expensive, though.

 

Well, the card I bought was only 25 quid, and, d'oh, I was stupid
enough to buy the 11b one instead of 11g. So, I might just bye a 11g
external device like you and right the 25 quid off to experience.

Ah. The box I have has XP Home on it (you recall I got it from Ebay).
Think I'll bring my MSDN disks home from work and put XP Pro on it, in
that case.

Yes, I know that much. Can I blag the batch job and task set up from
you? Any other config/setup I need to know?

Me neither. What I *think* I want is a keyboard with a built in
trackball (for sofa surfing), using RF (not infrared). There's some
around in the US
(http://www.fentek-ind.com/rf-wireless-keyboard.htm#kbmrftb) but I
can't find any in the UK. Googling for this stuff is really
frustrating - you just get loads of directory style sites that all
link to the same places and each other.

 

sure - it's only invoking XMLTV with the right params.

Only that it's a good idea to update the PVR-350's drivers to the
absolute latest version you can find (and this is not necessarily on
Hauppauge's website - there's a PVR forum (forget URL just now) which
has more up-to-date versions, though I don't remember how/why this is).

yup - there are quite a few nice-looking ones in the states but none at
sensible prices in the UK. There are ways around that, though.

Tell. Me. About. It.

 

bad form etc.

Just after posting that, I decided to have another look and found:

http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/product.php?productid=16790#
now, it's only IR, rather than RF, but it's pretty cheap.

 

Out of interest, is that a DVB card, or just analogue?

One for the shamurai website, shurely

 

Champ wrote:

Sir might like a nice gyro mouse http://www.gyration.com/ultragt.htm

 

Yeah, I've seen that. But, from reading a couple of forums, people
have said that having to ensure it's pointing at the PC is a bit of a
pain. Cheap enough to try, tho, I guess.

 

Yea, if I have to go for separate keyboard and mouse, I'll definitely
go for a gyro mouse.

It's difficult to know how I'll use this machine yet, cos it's a
pretty new way of using a PC. However, I'm imagining that if I'm
sprawled on the sofa, with no solid desk to keep keyboard and mouse
together, it'll be a real pain to switch between keyboard and mouse.
Hence my preference for a keyboard with built in trackball.

 

Analogue only.

deffo.

 

rb wrote

I have a cheapo Microsoft one that works a treat from the other side of
the room.