Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, I decided to make use of a case I got late Summer from an online transaction. The buyer was someone purchasing a computer and insisted on providing several items along with the cash payment I requested. The computer case smelled like smoke, contained cockroach carcasses and frass, and was still otherwise filthy. I ended up putting it in a trash bag, spraying Raid in the bag, and leaving it in my garage. The weekend after Christmas I finally got it out, removed the board, and began cleaning it up. After a few rounds of cleaning over a few hours, I got all of the brown sludge out of it and it started smelling clean. The hardest part was getting the gross brown tar dust out of the creases of the plastic front cover.

With the house to myself, I gathered all the parts, lay them out on the table as above, and began. That’s when I met my first hurdle: the rear panel does not come out and the ports do not match.

That saddened me deeply, but then I got over it and decided that cutting holes was the best idea ever. Before I got to cutting, I decided to give it a little test. Don’t mind the state of the monitor. I snagged it for $0.63 at a yard sale 15-20 years ago. The scuffs were why it was so cheap. Why the weird number? It was just something in the moment I guess.

That was when I noticed that the case had no cabling. Nothing for power buttons, nothing for LEDs. I guess I’ll need to figure something out.

Confident that something was working, I got to cutting. It wasn’t pretty, but it fit. To make it more pretty, I added some epoxy putty. After letting it settle, I eventually sanded it down.

I’m not a huge fan of the holes, but it’s not completely ugly. Testing, I still need to fix the holes for the PS/2 mouse, but that’s not really a concern. Maybe I’ll borrow the kid’s tools and give it one more go.

Having finally mounted the board, I get to work fabricating a power button. I don’t have pictures of the button pieces, but for the cable I used the coded cable from a DVD player. For those that don’t know, DVD drives used to require an external decoder card to play DVD disks. That technology is obsolete, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have the cards, so I don’t really need it any more. I ended up epoxying strips of aluminum from soda cans into the plastic holder for the power switch and then later wedging the contacts from the cable up against the aluminum strips. The power signal only needs a momentary close, and the exact resistance doesn’t matter. On the backside of the power button I epoxied a small loop of copper to press against the aluminum contacts I made. The button has built-in springs, so a momentary switch is born.

From there, I had just enough to work with, so I installed a case fan to address the error messages, installed a SSD and then installed Fedora Linux. Why Fedora? Well, that’s because Mint crashed from the desktop shortly after boot and I didn’t feel like doing real troubleshooting.

It started to feel real, and I had ordered some sets of switches and LEDs. The original Dell switch had the power LED built into the power switch. Drive activity LED or reset switches were not part of the original build, and while I wanted drive activity, I wasn’t interested in a reset switch.

I didn’t document the process much here, but here is testing the LEDs.

I had to wedge the power LED near enough to the power button to allow the light pipe to pick it up. The drive activity LED is shown here wedged into the case near the vent.

I wasn’t a fan of that location and ended up carving out part of the plastic case and using hot glue to keep it in place.

Here it is from the outside, looking pretty. It’s 9MB, so I don’t blame you for skipping this one.

I was pretty happy with that, so I took a few more minutes to clean the board well and do some cable management.

On the software side, I initially tried playing Minecraft, but it was terrible. This was paper MC on a network server, but I hadn’t disabled enough to play well.

Eventually I had nearly everything turned all the way down and it was playable… more or less. (SUPER NINJA EDIT! I forgot I put an AMD HD 4530 in there, and that’s why it was so playable)

No matter what I did, reducing the resolution and using mods to disable most effects, Hollow Knight was still unplayable.

Using Firefox was fine. It even played Jellyfin without any complaints. Videos do seem to need to take a little bit to buffer or they end up skipping frames.

The last thing I tested was LibreOffice and then Opened a Sheets .xlsx in excel.com. The Sheets was a test of patience, and crashed several times trying to use larger data sets. It even caused Firefox to crash due to OOM. I had to use a smaller data set (50k lines instead of 100k) and everything was much better. I did not have the patience to find where it really started to struggle, but MOST spreadsheets are not that large.

I had to put it down for a couple weeks, but after asking people’s opinions of what games to test on it, I was given the following:

Doom: No problem! I would be concerned if I couldn’t get it to play Doom.

Elder Scrolls Arena: It was perfectly playable, but the audio was a little bit crackly.

Elder Scrolls Daggerfall: It was laggy in dosbox and the audio was terribly crackly.

More testing to be done in comments, but for now I’m pooped!