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!

The Alien Has Landed

 

After a lot of searching, researching, eBay messaging, Fedex package tracking, AND hand-wringing...... the Alienware Aurora 7500 has arrived from Oakland, CA. Now comes the hard part. The actual building of this older machine from what it is into a (relatively) up-to-date gaming computer.

Let's start with the model of Alienware that we're working with in this project. The Aurora 7500 was one of the last of the "classic" Alienware desktops. The kind with the smooth outer case that really started their well-know lighting effects. In reality, these cases were simply mid-towers of varying sizes with external plastic cladding made for them by Chieftec. Unlike today's (post-Dell) machines, they are actually very normal underneath with pretty regular drive cages, PSU locations, MB attachments and even cooling system. This make them almost ideal for updating and adaptation.

As you can see, the insides are VERY, very normal. They pretty much all take an ATX motherboard which we'll discuss later. As equipped from the factory, they generally had fairly stock, though high-end motherboard of the CoreDuo/Core2Duo generation. Depending on how the machine was configured, they had either a "tower"-style HSF (Heatsink-fan) or (for the desktops of that time), the more radical "closed-loop" water-cooling setup. Pretty much everything inside these things were fairly normal, albeit, highly spec for the time.

Despite it's age, in our situation, we're certainly not looking to just rip it's guts out and put in a bunch of new stuff.....not if we can help it anyway. This machine comes equipped with an E8400 "Wolfdale" Core2Duo CPU, which is well-known as having excellent gaming characteristics as well as over-clocking potential if we want to go in that direction. What this does is, buy us time. In all probability, we'll look to do a major upgrade on the machine in the fall by replacing all the "guts". In the meantime, what's in this box will allow my student to play games at decent frame rate set at low or medium levels.

Which leads us to the heart of the issue. The reason that the seller was getting rid of this machine was that it was giving him graphic artifacts on his monitor. From looking at the pictures he posted in his ad, it was obvious that it was a graphics card issue. There was of course the possibility that I'm wrong and it's the Southbridge chip on the MB, in which case, that's scrap and we go directly to ripping that out of the case and starting over. But as it turned out, I was right. After a quick graphics card swap on the bench, the machine came right up with a "clean" screen! We are going to approach this from a couple of different directions. First, we're going to try the "bake the graphic card in the oven" recipe and see if we can at least temporarily solve the issue by "reflowing" the solder of the BGA on the GPU.If that doesn't work, we can use one of the many random cards I have stashed away for a situations such as this. In the meantime, a new graphics card (one really for the rebuild) will become the first purchase.

Otherwise, for the duration of the summer, this machine will remain "stock". Then around fall, when enough money has been saved to purchase updated insides, we'll rebuild it into the new Super (yet frugal) Alien.

The World of Shipping

I know it seems pathetic, but much of my free time centers around waiting for the arrival of the prosaic cardboard box. It's so common now with the advent of the efficient shipping services that we don't even think about it any more. Here in the states (and probably most of the rest of the world), we don't think twice about ordering online and expecting a package to arrive "in due time" from halfway around the world. Given my hobbies, I pretty routinely order from Hong Kong, China and even Australia. 

 

Since I live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth "Metroplex", I don't have to order some somewhere else. There are many places where I'm able to find things, so I'm not completely eBay, Newegg or Amazon bound. We have several Fry's, but my favorite is Micro Center. And like I discuss in the last post, even that "den of inequity" known as Best Buy can be useful on occasion. However, as you well know, I'm a bargain hunter and I also tend to delve in the odd and obscure, so I'm a pretty big internet user....which makes me a bit of an expert on shipping. In a past life, I was responsible for shipping quite a bit at work, so there's that experience as well. On top of that, I kind of use eBay as an on-going electronic "garage sale" (that's boot sale to you Brits). 

Around here, my standard is the United States Postal Service. As often infuriating as they are (does ANYONE not think that their hours are ridiculous?), they are convenient in that they are everywhere. They are also cheap, particularly if you are familiar with their Priority Mail "if it fits, it ships" policy. However, they have many restrictions, the lines are crazy, and as the weight and size of package goes up, they tend to be less economical.

I guess you can see that I'm not a big UPS fan. I generally try NOT to let "Brown" do anything for me. I find that they beat up their boxes more than any other shipper, and the local distribution point is very inefficient. You know; that highly detailed tracking system tends to work against you when people can easily see when (down to the time) a package arrives and when it goes out for delivery! I don't know if others are better, but the DFW terminal will routinely have a package just sitting there over a day before it goes onto a delivery truck. UNACCEPTABLE! On top of which, our little town doesn't have either a UPS office OR one of those office super-stores that will take their packages. 

Personally, I'd prefer to use FedEx. In my experience; they tend to be the most accurate, efficient and beat up the packages the least. Although I must say that I have developed that strong dislike for the "Smartpost" system that they've partnered with USPS to create. I find that it only offers the disadvantages of both systems. It takes longer than either. Of course, it's only available to really large scale originators like Newegg or Amazon, so that may very well be the reason behind the "Free" or "Super-Saver" shipping, so I shouldn't complain. 

I've found both Canada and HongKong Posts to be very efficient and reasonable. In my limited experience with them, they seem to be superior in virtually every way to the USPS, but of course that may be due to the small sample size. 

At any rate; these days, I feel like a child waiting for Christmas wanting to rush home to see if Mail-Santa has left me something!