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...*grumble*
I should have read the rules first... damnit.
Oh well... by the time I noticed it was paint-only, I'd already spent two hours on this, so I'd might as well post it.



It's Chris Jones, about to whack Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist with a... erm... Pogo-stick.Ã,  Or rather, a stick, to which is tied Pogo the Monkey from GTA fame.Ã,  That counts, does it not?

You can kind of tell at what point I noticed this would not be eligible for Sprite Jam... bout halfway through CJ... so the quality past that point isn't so great.Ã,  Oh well.Ã,  It's funny anyhow - at least to me.Ã, 

Why Bill Frist?Ã,  No idea.

If I get the ambition, I'll redo it in true sprite form, for real contest submission.

In the way of a Radeon 9000...

I've got a desktop model, I can't rightly tell you how the notebook ones fare, but it may be pretty close... Quality is good, framerate is fair, but they have a little trouble with smoke effects sometimes... games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 work almost flawlessly, Far Cry-level games run noticeably a little slower than normal, Doom 3 beta runs only a few frames per second... but it's still a nice card, as long as you don't have to have the best of the best performance.

For free domain redirection, I recommend www.no-ip.com ... They're reliable, they've got probably a dozen domain suffixes to choose from, and they provide a utility that will automatically update the redirection address if it happens to change (like it would if you had a dynamic IP).

Evil and I used no-ip for quite a while on MikeandHarry before it inevitably went down for work.

I believe 802.11g ideally runs at 54Mbps, and 802.11b ideally runs at 11Mbps... of course, this is from only a couple yards away from the transmitter.. there's also 'Extreme G' which some companies support that reaches over 100Mbps. 802.11a was short-lived - a broader band version of b, reaching 54Mbps - the T1 of wireless networks, as it were.

I've always fancied Sony laptops for their feature sets, but they're expensive, too, so i don't really know... Toshiba, in the way of laptops, is relatively reliable.

Pentium M is in most cases slower (sometimes much slower) than P4, but it is being hyped because its lower clock speed and redesigned core make battery life stretch much farther.Ã,  The tradeoff is performance for length away from a wall.

No one really knows what Centrino is, it's a mystery to mankind, like venus, or an automatic transmission.

Heh, I kid.Ã,  Centrino is a chipset that integrates various wireless capabilities.Ã,  It supposedly is also intended to improve battery life, which I translate as not having to run the PCMCIA bus to host an external wireless card.Ã,  But I could be wrong.Ã,  The only laptop I have, after all, is a Dell from 1992... you can guess what that's like.

That depends largely on what kind of software is installed, and how much of it there is... If it was just drivers, stuff that doesn't exist outside the Device Manager, you'll be just fine - the drivers will remain, but it should be able to simply load new ones as devices are added and removed... that's the beauty of windows (as much as I hate to say those three words)... If you've got stuff like (and I'm going to use examples from my own system) Intel Application Accelerator and Giga-Byte System Manager installed, and you drop in a new chipset without these features, you might have a problem.  A good rule of thumb is, if you can get rid of it, do... Before you remove the old drives, check your Add/Remove Programs dialog for anything related to your old system; if there is anything, uninstall it... if you're adventurous, you could Uninstall devices via your Device Manager immediately before removing the drives, cleaning out the old drivers and stuff... but this, of course, is purely optional.

All in all, you shouldn't have too much of a problem, I've done it before on old equipment and not had a problem.  Good luck, tho.

The wonder of online PDFs, dude.

Anyway, I can explain (for the most part) where stuff gets plugged in...

Generally speaking, the colored wire is positive, and the white is negative... Also generally speaking, Pin 1 of any connector is positive, whereas the other one or two are negative.

Therefore, the colored wire of the Speaker (or the one marked +) should line up with Pin 1 of its header on the bottom of the board (17 in the diagram)...  The Power LED can go one of two places, depending on the number of wires it has.  If it has three, it goes in the #16 header on the bottom of the motherboard, with the negative (black or white) wire farthest from Pin 1 (the other two are positive, for a two-color LED).  If it has two, it goes in the upper left of the System Panel Header (#15), as shown here:



with the colored wire connected to the "PLED+" pin.  H.D.D. LED goes directly below that, in the same orientation.  The one with the power button graphic goes to the right of the Power LED connector, and the Reset Sw goes below that (the orientation of these two don't matter).  Don't worry about the dummy pin.  The m/b switch connector, I don't know about that... I've never encountered one before, actually, and there's no explanation on the case website... it isn't crucial to system operation though, so I say ignore it.

As for the USB connectors...
Two sets of four pins, right?  Well, this diagram should help things out a bit:



This is a diagram of the connector for USB ports 6 and 7 (apparently), #19 on the diagram.  Hooking up front USB is as easy as matching these to the plugs from the front of the case:
For one set of connectors:
-USB_PWR (the top one) = +5D
-P-6 = -D
-P+6 = +D
-GND (the top one) = Ground

For the second set:
-USB_PWR (the bottom one) = +5D
-P-7 = -D
-P+7 = +D
-GND (the bottom one) = Ground

USB_PWR provides the 5 volts that runs some USB devices, hence +5D
P+ and P- are the data connectors
GND is the ground connector for the bus power (the +5 volts above).
Don't mix and match the two sets of connectors between the two banks of pins, as you will get odd results...

Did this help? I can explain further, if need be.

That it? (Click for bigger version)

If you could give me the model of your motherboard, that'd be a great help...

1) the little white ones are floppy drive power connectors, simply enough... if you've got a floppy disk drive, you'll need to plug one of those in for it to work.

2) they're generally know as 'Molex' connectors, because that's who originally made them... not that that matters any... yeah, they plug into one of the opposite plugs coming from the power supply.

3) same deal

4) if you tell me the model of your motherboard, I can tell you where to plug them in... otherwise, it's rather hard to say... there's generally a bank of pins in the lower right hand side of the motherboard that these plug into, the motherboard pins probably have similar names to what's on the black plugs

5) The two large wires are most likely for front audio inputs, and should be plugged into the green and pink audio connectors on the back of the motherboard - run them out of the case through a hole (maybe a card slot) and plug them in on the outside.  THe little ones are your front USB connectors, if your motherboard has outputs for front USB, you can plug them into it... again, it's had to say without your motherboard model.

6) That looks to be a power connector from a front-mounted cooling fan... connect it to one of the opposite outputs from the power supply.

7) Don't worry about that one, it's to make the power supply backwards-compatible with older machines... if yours is relatively new, you won't need it, the regular ATX power connector is all you need.

Funny, most motherboards have a safety shutoff when they detect that either the processor's temperature has exceeded 80 degrees, or the processor fan's RPM is below, say, 1000RPM :/

I'll agree, though, that stock coolers are usually worthless.  Especially if you overclock.  And if I wasn't so poor, I'd replace mine, too.

What kind of coolant is it?Ã,  A paste, a gel, or a pad?Ã,  If a paste (such as Arctic Silver [which, dare I say, is the best on the market]), there's a great little tutorial on applying it here...  To summarize, it goes on both the heatsink and the cpu.

What do these wires look like?Ã,  A picture of them would be great, to identify them... Are they a whole bunch of thin wires, with little black connectors on the end?Ã,  In that case, those are the power and HD LED, power switch, and related wires... otherwise, they could be motherboard connectors for front USB, FireWire or front audio...Ã,  Or it could be a fan connector from a front-mounted fan.Ã,  Some pictures would really help

Ã,  Ã, |\^/\^/|
Ã,  Ã,  \ \/ \/ /
Ã,  Ã, /wwww\
Ã,  |wwwwv|
Ã,  |vwwww|
Ã,  |wwwwv|
Ã,  Ã, \wwww/
Ã,  Ã,  Ã, -------

Ta-da! Pineapple!
Next topic: erm... Mushroom.. That better sticks with the Mario theme than my other suggestion. (edited)

IDE cables will only (for the most part) restrict airflow if the case happens to have a front-mounted fan... for a regular case with only a CPU fan (or cpu and rear fans), air is generally not drawn from the front of the case, and if so, is only drawn to equalize the pressure drop caused by the rear fan moving air out of the case... I don't think they'd be a major problem...
(If my logic is off, i apologise... i'm a little wired right now )

What's the model of your processor, Flippy? are you using a retail processor and heatsink combo, or an OEM processor and homebuilt cooling system?Ã,  This might be helpful information to get from you, too, InCreator..

Perhaps there's a buildup of dust in your heatsink?  or your fan?  Is the fan pushing a lot of air, can you tell?  You may need to clean the heatsink, the fan blades, the fan's bearings, or other stuff...  Also, some additional case fans could not hurt ( Haddas) - and you can get them cheap usually (www.newegg.com has a great special on 80mm fans right now - 10 for $10 American, free shipping - dunno if they do international orders tho).  Or yank one from an old computer, if you've got it.

Critical temperature is generally accepted as 80 degrees... but most system information tools will warn you when it reaches 60, so this could be the low point...

As for the spyware issue... Spyware will only raise your cpu temp if it's pushing your processor at 100% all the time... if your Task Manager says it's around 5 or 10% active, the software is not to blame.

Well, that's my two cents.  Good luck.