I paid for a bunch of my schooling by working with computer hardware, installing this and that, etc, but I really haven’t gotten into it in recent years - in fact, the lack of options was the exact reason I bought my first iMac in 2001.
Lately though, it’s become really obvious that I’m not part of the hardware scene. Sure, I can replace a dead laptop drive (the Powerbook has an insane number of screws, but it had the same number when I was done with it, so I count myself as semi-skilled), but I tend to make (hopefully) common mistakes like learning about SATA drives by accidentally buying one and taking it home to find out it doesn’t fit (to be fair, it was the store’s mistake - I did ask for IDE).
A drive enclosure failure convinced me to go shopping at lunch today for some new parts - I want to try the new Vista beta, so I bought a new 250 gig drive and a DVD burner. That was pretty easy. Putting them into the case, of all things, turned out to be challenging.
I’ve got what’s called a Cooler Master Centurion 5 (CAC-T05) case, which is, uh, a case… Like most cases I installed in my youth, it has face plates in front of the drive bays that aren’t being used. The new DVD burner needed a home, so one had to pop out. In the past, they were the snap-in kind, and I’d just pull them out, but these ones wouldn’t give, even after bending them a bit (they’re metal). I have a history of breaking things only to discover the “missing” screw immediately afterwards, so I went online to see if there was a guide. For a case. A frickin’ chunk of metal that merely encloses the thousands of dollars of space-age electronics. That I couldn’t figure out.
Anyway, the good news is that I wasn’t alone - I saw several reviews that commented on the face plates. None had a picture. The Cooler Master site didn’t have much to offer either: even the “how do I mount my drive bay devices to the case” question in the FAW just said “you have to dismount the front panel (frame) of the chassis.” Yeesh.
The answer, it turns out, was in the “How do I clean the perforated screen for the C5’s front panel?” answer. I’ll never understand PC hardware again. Maybe it’s a zen thing; a tidy case is a productive case or some such.
You can see the obvious solution here, if you’ve bothered to read this far. Just hover the mouse over the little S at the end of question 1.
Technorati Tags: Centurion 5, drive bays
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