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!

Reanimating the Alien.....ware: Part 1

Let me do a quick update, in case it's been too long since I wrote about this student-project. This is what my student's Alienware Aurora 7500 looked like when it came to us from California.... complete with FUBAR'd video card. It was just short of $200 with shipping. After a quick, oven bake; the GPU came back to life and functioned for several months while my student worked and saved for the build. About a month or so ago, the Windows 7 load crashed and "that was that". There wasn't any real point in saving it, or reloadinng, so we started looking at the parts vs. budget trade-offs.

In the meantime, we got serious about what it would look like. She had originally wanted one of the "Post-Dell" buyout computers with the sliding front panel done in flat black. However; after realizing that, that generation's machines only took Micro-ATX sized boards, we decided against going that route. In the meantime, we came across this amazing "mod" by the MNPC folks where they took specific panels and used a spray paint technique that gave it a carbon-fiber look.

 

You can see from the close-ups that the effect is remarkable! Overall, we decided that this gave us a great combination of flexibility of a full-sized case, yet a unique look that wouldn't cost too much to replicate.

 

The build will be based on the latest version of Gigabyte's G1 Sniper line that has the Z97 chipset. This not only gives it the ability to take the "Devil's Canyon" update of Intel's "Haswell" processor, but a unique high-end audio section that's isolated on the motherboard from digital interference. This was an important feature for her since she's very music oriented.

 

 

 

The timing of it couldn't have been more perfect occurring around the last week of November, thus coinciding with Newegg's avalanche of "Black Friday" sales! All-in-all, I'd estimate that we probably saved over a $100 on all these various parts. I've already talked about the motherboard, so here's the rest of it. The whole she-bang will be run by an Intel i5 4690K processor, with 16Gb (2 x 8Gb) of Corsair Vengeance Pro RAM. The OS will be loaded on a Crucial 240Gb MX-100 SSD, and the graphics handled by an EVGA/nVidia GeForce GTX 660 video card. At the end of the day, this whole set-up will come in below $1000..... and that's including the original Alienware computer! Stay tuned as I continue this series with build-logs as we make progress from here!

HooToo 2.... The Device That's Changed My Life!

Let me just say; tablets on car trips are AWESOME! Did we just let the kids turn them on and use them the whole time? No. We did other things as well; like read books..... actual physical books, but when it was time for a little change of pace?

 

Let me back up and start from the beginning. Remember when I wrote about the HooToo Tripmate Nano I bought for $20 from Newegg, 'cus I wanted to try out "cloud" concepts in my classroom? After using it, almost on a daily basis, I became more and more sold that this device was going to be solid and useable in a variety of situations. You know how during family get-togethers, everyone hurries to get there and then there are seemingly endless hours of boredom sitting around and contemplating your navel? You remember all those trips hither and yon during the summer where there are hours sitting in the car dozing or looking out the window hoping you see something interesting? Yup, that time was fast approaching. So I started playing around with the HooToo, powering it from various sources of electricity, ranging from cellphone adapters, to car-plugs and misc. other sources. I quickly learned that this thing draws so little power that can use darned near any USB (5v) source. I tried every single car-style plug I had and they all powered it fine. So on our trip to Caddo Lake State Park which ended up taking about 3 and a half hours when all was said-and-done, it allowed the kids to watch whatever I had on the "stick".

This was my other "revelation". Admittedly not huge, but a revelation none-the-less. I had started out using the HooToo with a USB flash drive because that's what my classroom use files were on. Of course, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files don't take up lots of room, however, video files DO. I knew that people often bought software to "rip" DVDs into files that could be read on other devices, but I didn't want to go out and buy something I wasn't even sure was going to work. What to do? Why.... YouTube is the answer of course! A few videos later I came found a solution. Download a couple of free pieces of software: DVD Decrypter, and the well-known Handbrake, and even a software-phobe like me could take his own DVDs, strip out the encription, and rip the resulting file down to a size that was small enough to be truly portable. Now, it's not as easy as all that. You do have to "play" with it a little and see where the balance is "for you", between small file size and image quality, but it's not too bad at all. In the follow week or so after I figured it out, I "ripped" something like 60 of the DVDs in our collection! This is where my newly upgraded Ivy Bridge computer came into play. I was able to do it in half the time that my older machine would have taken. The typical movie ranged from a little under 1Gb to some that were just a little over. All in all, I was able to do the first batch of 20 and they were just a bit over 15Gb. I realized that at the rate I was going, the 32Gb stick that I had previously thought of as huge would be out of space pretty soon. Lucky for me though, we went to Costco about that time and they were running a sale on the Sandisk Cruzer Ultra 64Gb flash drive for $35. So, another 40 DVDs got ripped and put on it. 

 

In the ensuing weeks, I tried everything. We connected to it from 2, 3 and 4 tablets/phones while watching the same or different movies, starting, stopping, skipping back and forth without issue. I even got my hands on my wife's old Motorola Atrix cellphone "emergency" battery that they gave her with that phone. Even that thing powered the HooToo Tripmate. It didn't just work: this slim little device that's only about 600mah at most, last somewhere between 3 and 4 hours.... after having been charged up 2 years ago and left to sit in the car the entire time since! Today, I tried to charge up the solar battery/charger my wife bought me 5 years ago to see if it would run it! Stay tuned on that.....

 

This started me really thinking. I could pick up one of the bigger external charging batteries and become my own little walking cloud! I could just put a piece of Velcro on the Tripmate and attach it to the battery and thus have 6, 8 plus hours of serving whatever files, wherever I wanted. After a little research, I found that the bigger versions of these batteries can charge multiple devices including tablets and cost somewhere between $50 and $100. Which brought this to mind.

The new version of the HooToo; the TripMate Elite just hit the market. And at around $60 on Amazon and carrying it's own built in battery, why don't I just upgrade? If it sounds like I'm a little "over-the-top" on this, it's because I am! I don't remember the last time I was this excited about a product. And I've gotta say; everyone who I've shown it to was just as amazed as I am!

WhoDat HooToo?

This is pretty much the reaction of my students when I told them about HooToo. Who's/What's HooToo, they/you ask?

These guys are not well known. Well Duhh!!! They are a small outfit that's just a few years old out of Silicon Valley (of course), that up to this point has some USB hubs and one really interesting product.... in a couple of variations.

....the HooToo Tripmate HT-M01. That's it up there. It's about the size of an old clamshell cellphone. What does it do? Well...... what does it not do is a better question! It is a WiFi router, NAS, WiFi/Network bridge, charger and personal "Cloud". In essence; it's the answer to my geek-boy prayers! I did not buy this. It's $50.

I bought this! This is the HooToo Tripmate HT-M02 "Nano". It's the size of 3 saltines stacked together, as you can probably tell by the relative size in comparison to the USB and Ethernet cables in the picture. It was $20; well, actually $18.xx. The difference? It doesn't have a battery and has to be plugged into some source of power delivered through the micro-USB cable. So, it doesn't charge stuff, and it's power delivery is limited. However, it will in fact run a flash drive, I wanted to test the concept and it was CHEAP!

What concept? You guys might have noticed that I've been yammering about "cloud" type things for a while now. I have a need for people to access files via devices, whether tablet, phone or computer, wherever it is I'm at. My students need files from me. My children need videos from me, and my wife needs whatever comes to her mind from me. One of the things I've run into is that the majority of tablets don't have regular ports on them to read storage, no USB, no SD card reader. What HooToo does (HT-M01, Nano, Elite) is to create your own little cloud around you.

 

Kind of like Pig-pen in Charlie Brown. Plug in any USB storage and it will use it's wireless access point (with or without) internet and broadcast it out to whoever has it's Tripmate app. There are apps for Android, iOS and PC. My position on the device was that, the idea sounded cool, and I had a use for it. But it was so new that I didn't want to invest a lot of money into it and have it NOT WORK. For me; $20 is an amount that I can handle losing, but $50 would irritate me.

It showed up in the mail yesterday from Newegg and I got it working last night. Then tried it out in my classroom today. It worked exactly the way they said it would. The set up was very simple and in fact if I was them, I'd replace that large confusing manual with a Quick Setup Guide. My students downloaded the app and were instantly able to access the files they needed. You might be asking, if we have B.Y.O.D. and WiFi internet access all over the building, what is the purpose of having this thing? Isn't it redundant? Yes, we have the whole Google Drive/Google Docs thing and yes indeed, most kids have their own device and others have school provided notebook computers. However, all of this is subject to the vagaries of our heavily filtered network where files are uploaded to god-only-knows-where and back down again in the same room. Isn't that just a little perversely inefficient? Besides which, I have a number of students who for whatever reason still can't get on to the system. Don't know why. This way, I can get them what they need directly! And if you are in a school district that doesn't have those resources at all.......?

Who doesn't have one of these? With this and my Nano, I am the king of all that I survey, or at least inside my classroom anyway! "Behold; I am become the cloud".....or something like that anyhow.

And when I'm not teaching? Well; I'm completely expecting that HooToo to go on vacation with us. This will give me a way to provide files to the children in the backseat while they are on their tablets.

Now that I know that it works and I have uses for it. My plan is to buy the soon to be released Tripmate Elite which not only has a battery (that my Nano doesn't), but two higher amperage USB jacks so that it can function as the one charger for out phones and tablets, wired connection to the hotel's network via the Ethernet and provide my own WiFi Access Point as well. The best part of this $50-60 device? It'll keep me from having to buy the Corsair Voyager Air for $200!