James Lloyd

Just found this how to get your Vista refund! means you can use your refund towards your new mac. Hmm this post doesn’t bode well with my i’m not an OS bigot post earlier. So on a positive spin, if you think having a 0 byte text file taking 15 seconds delete is your idea greatness, then Vista’s the OS for you!.

But seriously the media centre is great especially if you have an Xbox 360 in another room!

So my media centre is now in place in the lounge, and is looking rather fabulous, even while in black. Why the manufacturers insist on changing colours from silver to black every no and then I don’t know.

As you can see the Silverstone LC16M is quite big, slightly taller than my AV receiver and a lot deeper. What doesn’t work so well is the amount of noise the whole thing makes. The fan noise that was quite acceptable in its tower case upstairs in the back room, just wont do in the lounge. I have had to order a pair of copper coolers a Zalman CNPS7500-CU to replace the stock AMD 64 3200 stock cooler and a Zalman VF700-CU to replace the XFX Geforce 6800 GT fan and heat sink.

After a lot of poking about in side the case I’m 98% certain the heat sinks aren’t going to clash with anything.

So far the only down side from moving away from XBMC is that you have to wait for the PC to boot, but that’s not very long. The interface running at 720p is stunning, compared to XBMC. Just hope the new coolers shut the box up.

Yesterday my silverstone LM16 Media PC case arrived, all very exciting. So last night I after getting back from City link I immediately tor apart my desktop tower case.

In researching the case I had noted that due to the Centre mount DVD drive location, I was limited to a maximum length of 225mm for the graphics card which would sit right behind it. I measured my Geforce 6800 GTS (I cant remember the make, but its the reference board so most other 6800’s will be the same, think about it BFG rings a bell), the card was 220mm long, hoorah I though 5mm to spare.Once the case arrived I mounted the my Motherboard and DVD writer (a dual layer Sony job) in the case and saw that though with the ATA cable in the back of the DVD drive the fit would be tight (the ATA lead using up the remaining 5mm) they would fit in hoorah again! The rejoicing was short lived once I remember the power connector on the back of the Geforce card, there would be 0mm available to fit the power connector. Arse Burgers!.

Also I spotted because the PSU is mounted at what would be the bottom of the motherboard of a normal ATX tower case, the separate ATX 12v 4 pin connector lead was going to be less than half the length it should be.

Solution: So I got the soldering Iron out and an old blown up ATX PSU to cannibalise. I soldered a spare female power connector to the back of the VGA card (cringe). Then spliced in another 100mm to the ATX 12V connector.

After then finishing the step by step instructions for the case (one of the steps was “Now connect all the wires!!!”). Everything worked first time. There is loads of room for more kit within the case with my 3 hard drves in the case there is a room for another 4 drives (a spare caddy for 3 and an adaptor can be used to mount another under the optical drive).

Also worth noting I decided not the get the lm16-MR which has the built in card reader, instead getting the standard version which has 4 usb 1 firewire and mic and head phone jacks instead. The bay where these go is a floppy bay so any cheap card reader will go in there fine, like the one I already have.

It wasn’t till about midnight last night I got the whole thing running in the lounge, and the case looks rather cool sat next to my Sony receiver being nearly the same height. I haven’t had time to investigate the VFD or Remote yet properl,y but will do in shortly. Will also be replacing Media centre 2005 with Vista Ultimate, not because I crave a rubbish user experience or appreciate a slower UI, but purely for the new version of media centre.