The Alienware Part 3: A Merry Alien Christmas!

All the parts were gathered..... kind of. The students sitting around the table in a circle. The patient laying on it's side with it's internal spaces open for access. Tools laid out. It was almost like one of those surgery theaters you see in a TV show or movie.

I stood there watching my student walking through all the internal parts that would go into the cosmetically altered Alienware Aurora 7500 with all the other computer club kids. I felt a bit like a proud doctor dad watching his surgeon daughter about to perform her first surgery!

In fact, we had done most of the hard work 2 days ago, when she and I reassembled the repainted case. All-in-all, it took the better part of two hours. While we were at it, we adjusted the "stand-offs" to the holes of the new motherboard, attached the drives to their slide-in frames, made certain all the connections we had, had somewhere to attach, AND that we knew where that "somewhere" was! The actual build took less than an hour, with much of that time being taken up by the adjustment and attachment of the Heatsink/Fan assembly.

Was there drama? Well..... yes, in that due to holiday shipping issues, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo didn't arrive until the afternoon of the build. So I had to run home and get it off of my porch and bring it back to school! "Smart-Post" might be the single most idiotic shipping "solution" ever! Let's just say that it took a package that was supposed to arrive on Friday until the following Tuesday to get to my house from Newegg's Memphis facility! It's actually not an issue with either FedEx or USPS..... just the interchange between the two which adds one or two days to the process that I take exception to!

 

Anything else? Well, at least partially thanks to Smart-Post, the "bay" card reader/USB 3.0/fan controller didn't arrive till yesterday. That leaves it for me to install when I do the Windows load some time in the next couple of days.

Is there a silver lining? I'll have to say "absolutely"! I'll have this machine completed and back to her before Christmas! As I sit here typing this, the re-animated alien is happily purring away right here next to me loading it's updates. So, when she gets home from skiing in New Mexico, it'll be ready to go home. Plus, last week, we were able to finish my other computer club student's computer rebuild as well. So all this stuff is done before the holidays, which not only allows me to work on my projects (more to come), but more importantly, allows them to have their shiny toys to play with during the 2 weeks off! Merry Christmas indeed!