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Repurposing

With a little help from my friends, I was able to get Nexus into a new case last night, with some new hard drives, a new motherboard, processor, 1280 megs of RAM, etc. The process was remarkably smooth once we found a power supply that could reach the motherboard from the Antec Three Hundred’s power supply tray at the bottom of the case. The CPU fan is a little loud, but tucked under my desk I was unable to hear it last night. I may still even get a quieter fan for the CPU, and two quiet 120mm fans to help keep the hard drives extra ventilated. I probably need to throw in one more SATA adapter to allow a full compliment of hard drives, and then Nexus will be set for probably the next five years.

The major hiccup during the upgrading of Nexus was a dead graphics card; however, the Radeon 9700 Pro from the currently languishing Kaleidoscope fit the bill and got the project back on track. However, it got me to thinking about what Kaleidoscope’s future will be, and this morning I figured it out. Kaleidoscope will become a Media Center PC. All it needs is a suitable AGP card with Media support (component video + HDMI, perhaps?). Since AGP is so out of fashion, I should be able to find a decent card for cheap, and with a few cables It’ll be ready to go. The surround sound addition will also be nice. The weakest link will certainly be the size and picture quality of the TV.

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