Antecso’s birth was non-trivial, but I got to learn a lot from giving birth to it.

moments

1. Antec Solo case taken out of its cardboard box and wrapper. It’s icy cool, as I place it upright to remove its packaged installation components. The thumbscrews in the back are amazingly easy to untwist, and the side panel opens with its hinge on the axis made by the thumbscrews. The inside of the case looks amazingly clean with the big drive slider thingies all in place! Girly fingers push pretty hard on one corner of the preinstalled steel I/O Panel to remove and replace with the (flimsy) ABIT IP35 Pro alum panel (which has 7.1 sound and eSata!).
2. I ground myself by touching my toe to my old computer case, plugged into wall ground.
3. LGA775 Core 2 2.66ghz installation: I drop the chip into place, pin 1 aligned to phantom pin 1. (I forget to push out the pnp plastic thing at first, but took it off after. The latch takes a bit of force to tweak down.)
4. Ninja Scythe:
   1. Peeling off the protection film with a triangle with an ! in the center reveals that the metal beneath also has the same imprint. Smirking, I hook the LGA775 clip on.
   1. Ninja came with thermal grease sealed in a cute little plastic bag with watery stuff near the ends. I qtip swab the top surface of my chip.
   1. White pushpins push into the mobo heatsink holes. Black pushpins secure the big giant Scythe tower to the mobo.
   1. (there are 23 parallel metal plates on the scythe - wow way to celebrate my 23rd bday ;-P!)
5. I plug the cord of Antec Solo box’s box fan into auxfan1. (cpufan1 had 4 pins)
6. (The Ninja Scythe pops right off a couple of times; girly fingers too weak? grrr…)
7. I install g.skill 2gb cls5 memory onto dimm1
8. I add 5 more spacers to case, for a total of 9 spacers.
9. I install the psu. seasonic s12 330v.
10. Mobo installation. Antec on its back, the whole thing horizontal.
    1. in goes the thing (grr giant scythesink fell again - and forgot to knock out ps/2 protector -.-!)!
    1. 9th screw is a total pain to install, with PSU and heatsink and weird fuzzy copper cylinder thing blocking hand.
    2. I lose a screw a couple of times, and the endeavor becomes reminiscent of playing the “drop a hula hoop on a bottle” game at the arcade/circus.  >.<
11. I plug in psu 24v to mobo. usb antec frontpanel and usb expansion. put in graphics card eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT.
12. I open up the frontpanel to install dvd 48x with lightscribe, jumper cable select. I plug that into ide master.
13. I insert power/reset and corresponding leds. hdd led as well.
14. I insert 2 seagate 320gb sata’s. antec solo has interesting hdd cages that you slide out from the frontside and insert the screws on the bottom, against these rubber protectors. (alternatively, they have these elastic bands in lieu of metal supports o.O - I guess they lessen hdd vibration noise.)
15. I find out that ide’s on abit mobo are actually bent to the side. I had to take out 3.5″ drives to squeeze the ide connector in.
16. sata connectors (also to the side) are also a pain to wedge in through the hole in the frontpanel power.
17. I connect the frontport eSATA.
18. frontport hda connected. (had to detach backport usb addon’s)
19. big power to mobo main.
20. all cables bunched up (more or less)
21. psu, turned on (but main computer not on yet)
22. 01 error - reset cmos, connected 12v to cpu on mobo
23. c3 error… didn’t snap in ram hard enough o.O
24. and it boots!
25. bios - disable floppy. boot to windows server 2003 enterprise.
26. installed abit drivers for gigabit lan, eSata, etc.
27. downloaded flock, windows updates etc.
28. seagate software
29. abit drivers, etc. hdri installation
30. Antecso was born at about 10 PM SLT on 12/17/2007

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