I’ve seen this clip so many times but it never gets old. It’s just too cool. I probably have enough old PC parts to build one of these but I don’t know about spending all that money on mineral oil. Besides, it’s probably going to be a pain to dispose of it when the time comes… unless Autozone takes mineral oil. Hmm… Should I build one?
The hard drive finally came in the mail today. What a quick turn around and for 20 bucks plus free shipping, I can’t complain. Looks like I made a mistake though and only got the 10gb version instead of the 20gb model. It’s OK since I don’t think I’ll use up that much space. In fact, I don’t ever recall putting more than 10gb of mp3’s on this iPod.
As you can see from the picture, it looks about the same as the old one. With the exception of the model number and the Apple logo, it looks like the old drive and based on what I found, this hard drive should work just fine with my iPod. We’ll see about that.
After six long years, my iPod finally died and I think it was a slow and painful death too. It had been acting up recently and it was making clicking sounds over the last month or two. I am impressed that this iPod lasted for this long and I’m sure it will last a few more years assuming I can revive it or waste 25 bucks trying.
So instead of buying a new or used iPod, iPhone, etc, I thought it would be more fun to crack it open and experiment a little. Judging by the error on the display and the clicking noises, I was pretty sure that the hard drive is dead. Luckily, a new replacement drive is only about 25 bucks on eBay – definitely cheaper than buying another device.
It looks like time has come to retire my wife’s old computer and build her a new one. Her eMachine has been humming along for nearly five years now but it is starting to show its age. In fact, the upgrade is probably at least six months overdue. Poor thing can’t keep up with all those damned MS patches anymore! Oh and it got blasted by the same lightning strike that fried the hard drive on my old DVR. Her damage was limited to the built-in NIC. I guess I’m off to a little Newegg shopping.
So…what to get? I think the goal is to keep cost down and recycle some old parts like the CD/DVD ROM, HDD (IDE but works like a champ), and maybe adopt a slightly newer 8400GS gpu. That leaves three major parts: cpu, motherboard, RAM. I should also note that this build should last just as long if not longer than the old one and keep up with newer and heavier apps until then.
CPU
