by Alan Crease: alan.crease@net.ntl.com

I said in my last article that I was going to build two computer systems, as Christmas presents for my grand-daughter and one of her friends. Well, I started window shopping, (pun intended), back in the summer and I'm pleased to say everything finally went well, even if the target finishing date slipped from the first week of December until the 23rd. Thankfully, everything worked eventually and there were no faulty components as such. Thanks to the Internet I found good components at very good prices and, with only two exceptions, I was able to get the parts carriage free. In fact, if it wasn't for the Internet I wouldn't have been able to set up the systems to their optimum. But that's another story for later.

In the 4 months up to Christmas I only had one component scare and that was when I heard, 3 weeks after I'd bought the 2 hard drives, that Western Digital quality control had issued a recall on tens of thousands of 6.4GB per platter hard drives produced between the 27th August and 24th September. Fortunately, mine were produced in mid July. The problem was caused by one chip on the drive circuit board, which caused it "not to boot" after 3 or 4 months use. The outside supplier of that chip will no doubt be facing heavy legal costs. The other plus point was that nearly all the drives were still "in the channel", wholesale that is, although only 90% or so have been recovered. For full details on this problem look up www.westerndigital.com/fitness/drive-alert.html. Also be careful of W.D hard drives appearing at computer fairs. They are usually only sold by large retailers.

 

PICTURE 1 - THE CASE 

Anyway, moving on, the saga really began when I went looking for a case. After roaming the adverts and the Internet, I finally decided upon a SCAN "Clio" case as it looked contemporary but didn't have the rather flat toned add-on colour flashes of cases trying to be iMac' imitators. By chance, within a couple of weeks, I went to a local computer fair and saw one in the flesh and set up as a system ready for sale. Well, the construction looked OK and it had an adequate number of bays available for components as well as opening sides for easy access. The only initial question mark came when looking at the top bay of the plastic facia which is obviously designed for a CD drive. It has small sculptured curves on the inside face of the drive bay, as you can see in Picture 1. The problem was that the system on the table had a very common Creative Labs CD drive in this bay, but the curvy bits were partially obstructing the headphone socket and the "drive active" light was, as I recall, almost completely obscured! I went home and checked the SCAN web-site, (http://www.scan.co.uk/), where you can bring up a picture of their cases. I say "their" as their marketing gives the impression that they or an associate company make the case. Morex (http://www.morex.co.uk/) also market the case but without any suggestion of it being an in-house product. The image on screen appears to be different to the reality, with very little internal sculpturing. I even rang SCAN about the current design of their cases and enquired of customer support, where a young man told me that the cases were exactly as seen on the screen and didn't have the extra curvy bits to obstruct the CD drive.

"OH YES THEY DO", as I found out a month later when my order arrived. At this time I hadn't bought the CDROM drives so I was able to look for an alternative to the Creative Labs models. I'm not necessarily a fan of Creative Labs, but the drives are readily available at a good price and are presumably made to a reasonable standard. Or should I say they are really made under contract by Samsung, who have obviously manufactured all the C.Labs drives between about 12 and 48 speed: the tell-tale signs are the Made in Korea label, the front drive tray with a bulge in it as if it were 4 months pregnant and the finely elliptical drive buttons and central light.

But then a stroke of luck. In mid 48 speed cycle, C.Labs changed their CDROMs. The headphone socket and the drive light have been re-positioned and manufacture has shifted to Taiwan. Who makes them, I don't know, but the only indication is the message on boot-up which says "found BDC cdrom etc..".

It appears strange to me that a company which makes a case for world wide distribution manages to design it so that the product from one of the most ubiquitous names on the computer planet is impeded; and that's with a CD drive front panel design which must have remained unchanged for over 2 years. When I got round to opening up the case, by first lifting slightly and prising off the front plastic facia, I could see that the 2 year guaranteed Power Supply is by a company called Meridiancase (http://www.meridiancase.com/). A quick sortie on to the net revealed the whole Clio and Juno range of cases as marketed by Scan. The pictures at:
http://www.meridiancase.com/clio1%26clio2.html
also show a completely clean unsculptured top bay to the facia.

Onward: the real review:

It says on Scan's web-site, "Did you know it's not a crap case". Their expletive not mine.
* Look for their daily special offers)* Read on.

The contents of the case comprises of a mains lead, a pack of screws for your hardware, a spare slot cover, an assortment of plastic ties and cable guides, and a plated mask for the surround to the ATX motherboard sockets. The only oddity was what looks like a metal ring or is it ferrite? Another call to Scan offered the suggestion that you pass all your small case-to-motherboard wires such as "reset" and "hard-drive light", etc., through it. I've since seen this done on another case at a fair, so presumably it is designed to minimise some sort of electrical interference, even if it also imposes a weight on the attached wires. If this is how you're intended to use the ring then it is best taped to the bottom panel of the case; this will remove any weight loading on the wires. I didn't fit it on either of the two systems and no weird problems are known to have occurred in the first month. Please e-mail me with any definite information on this subject. To get to the interior you prise the plastic facia off its ridged metal grips to reveal 6 screws, which secure the front edges of the side panels, which themselves slide into locking slots in the chassis. The left hand side is open for access to the internal assembly, while the right hand side features a swing-out hinged motherboard frame.

 

 PICTURE 2 - INSIDE THE CASE

The first grouse. This was a lack of quality control. When I inserted the CD-ROM drive into its bay, from the front, it was twisted to the right by the misalignment of the interlocking metal parts of the inner chassis (see point A in Picture 2). This was the same on both cases. The result was that the front face of the CD drive was 5° out of parallel with the front face of the case. Not wanting to send the whole pair of cases back to Bolton I tried a little judicious pulling and tugging on both sides of the substantial but bendable inner frame and managed to straighten the bay out. The problem here originates in the method of constructing the cagework, which is a multitude of small pressings which interlock with other. If the bending of the lugs is inaccurate the next interlocking piece will be offset further than it's intended design. If the cagework was simply riveted you would need misplaced rivet holes to cause the same effect. This problem was a definite -1 on the overall satisfaction score sheet. Anyway the problem had been overcome, but it wasn't the last.

 I adopted the EPOX recommendations for assembling motherboard components.
"Lay your motherboard on a flat surface and fit as many components onto the board as possible before placing it into your case."
I suggest you make the flat surface a raised heavy book or similar, with the rear half inch of the motherboard beyond your raised support, then you will find it easier to insert cards into their PCI and ISA slots without the bottom stub of the card endplate pressing into you support. This works fine for the processor, heatsink & fan, memory, hard-drive and floppy interface cables, and any cards such as sound or modems. However AGP video cards, if inserted at this stage, will impede access to the rear central mounting screw when you secure the motherboard into the case. So at this stage I inserted and withdrew it a few times just to "run-in" the socket - for easier final fitting - before finally screwing the motherboard assembly into the swing-out/lift out frame of the case. A good job done, or so I thought.

 A little while later, with the case laying on its left hand side, I opened up the right hand side of the case, undid the 2 side and 2 rear panel screws for the motherboard frame, and hinged the assembly back to make cable connections to the CD drive. The frame is now about 15° to the vertical. !Crash! The motherboard and frame promptly fell out on the floor. It was one of those instant sweat and fear moments! The hinge part of the motherboard frame had snapped off and dumped everything on the carpet.!! Fortunately the motherboard and cards are made of tougher stuff.

 

 PICTURE 3 - THE HINGES

Yes Scan, it's a crap hinge!X?*!. (For position of hinges (sic), see points H in Picture.3). Now calling this thing a hinge is taking hyperbole to its limit. It's a bendable soft metal snubby extension of the motherboard frame pressing, which in turn fits in top and bottom metal rings attached to the main chassis. To lift it out, with the case in its working vertical position, you slide the frame upwards and lift the lower snubby bit out of its ring; just like fitting a sliding door into top and bottom runners. The problem is that there's no strength in this soft metal stub. The weight of the motherboard and cards, even at a moment of 15° from the vertical, was just too much for it. Two-thirds of the bottom stub had broken off. I fixed it by bending the hard metal hinge ring further up what was left of the stubby protrusion.

 If you worked on the case and kept it upright the chances are you would never encounter the problem. Lay the board out on its side, on a bench where it is much more convenient to work on, and you have a potential disaster waiting to happen. The only saving grace is the combination of side and rear locking screws I referred to earlier, which provide bi-directional stability to the whole swing-out frame, and fasten it in place, despite the damaged lower hinge. Please Meridiancase.com, fit a proper hard metal pin type hinge to this frame and the design will be greatly improved. That should cost all of 2NT$ (Taiwan). If that puts up the cost of the case by £1 in this country then it'll be worth it. Definitely a -1.5 on the score sheet.

 Oh, and another thing: when fitting the floppy drive you have to push it as far back as possible so that the side fixing screws (see lower arrow in Pic.2) are at the rear end of their 3mm long slot. If you don't do this, (I was using Mitsumi floppy drives), you get disk error messages when using the Windows startup/boot disks. This is because the disk eject button, built into the facia, is bearing ever so slightly on the floppy drive button and so that the internal mechanism is not fully released. An extra couple of millimetres of hole fixing slot would be welcome. It took me nearly an hour of wasted time to find out why things wouldn't work. Your first thought is duff disks; the next is a faulty floppy drive.

 In conclusion it's not a poor case; motherboard cradle hinge aside, it's sturdy. It provides good access to the interior, is easy to work on, almost every sharp edge has been smoothed off, the guarantee on the power supply is double that of most cases, and the two sets of frame securing screws save the day; but it could have been so much better. Final score is therefore 75%.

MORE OBSERVATIONS ON SETTING UP YOUR SYSTEM.

 Having checked out both the motherboard manufacturer web site, (http://www.epox.com/), and the chipset manufacturer, (http://www.via.com.tw/), it seems that the guidance on installing and optimising the basic software components of a system depends upon the combination of motherboard/chipset and your choice of operating system. If your board has an INTEL chipset then most of the work is done for you by Microsoft. (Ed: Do I hear a word of praise for Microsoft?)

 For example, with Windows 95 v1 and a VIA chipset you would need to install additional VIA AGP video driver software - before the video card drivers - when compared with an Intel chipset motherboard. Presumably AGP support for INTEL is built into Win 95.

 Two further incarnations of Windows down the line and things are a little changed. Microsoft has built support for VIA chipsets into Windows 98 v1, while "Direct X" and USB support no longer need to be separate installations. However, some VIA chipsets may be able to use something called an "IRQ routing miniport driver" followed again by the latest VIA AGP drivers. As a general guide, the pages at VIA and Epox suggest a specific order for installing software when setting up your hard drive:-

1. In all cases install your operating system first.
2. Then where appropriate, (it isn't always required), you install any IDE bus mastering drivers.
3. Install VIA or other IRQ routing miniport drivers, (if appropriate or required).
4. Install, (again where appropriate), the non-INTEL AGP video drivers, followed by your video card software.
5. Install any "fixes"
6. Install the sound card software.

 There are so many combinations to choose from that it's impossible to give definitive answers for your particular system. The only recourse is to check both your own motherboard and chipset manufacturers web-sites and see if they agree. I can't speak for motherboards with SiS or Ali chipsets so it's best to seek out their technical support pages at http://www.sisworld.com/ and http://www.ali.com.tw/.

The fixes are those small programs that deal with things such as the timing loop problem that confused the various over-350Mhz AMD K6 processors. For a pointer to this see the ICPUG PC News page (October 22 1999). Likewise there is the "Possible malfunction" of USB devices with the same processors when running under Win 98. Both of these fixes are easily downloadable from either Microsoft or AMD's web site, e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q240/0/75.asp .
I used the latter two fixes as a matter of course and have had no feedback telling me of a problem.

In the case of the final fix, my grand-daughter and her school friend now have USB mini-mice for small hands, which co-exist with the original cursor of their parents' main Microsoft mouse, so there is potential for assistance in a teaching situation. Young Hollie can show her mum and dad on what and where to click!

Till next time. See ya.

PS: Not quite all my own work. Special thanks to Phil Wadner for his valuable assistance with the scanning and creation of the JPEG pictures. (Ed: Thanks to me for rendering the pictures a little grainier than the originals, in order to speed up the download time and save server storage space. For some strange reason they appear worse in Internet Explorer than they do in Word or Front Page Express.)

 

Addendum from the Editor

In Vol.1 Issue 5 Alan wrote 'I have to disagree a little with some of Brian Grainger's comments about paying a premium (for a new PC) and expecting everything to work first time. For most purchases of components it is reasonably easy to find something which will work first time and keep working.'

It was good to see this article from Alan which indicates some of the hazards involved with building a PC yourself. Even if the electronics work the mechanics, (such as duff hinges and aesthetically shaped facia!), can let you down. Alan is very enthusiastic about his PC building. You should see his face light up at the Stevenage club meeting when he can borrow MY screwdriver to get inside his PC. Joking apart, I wish I had the time and confidence to do it. For those of us scared to use a hammer, in case we break something, paying the premium for someone else to wield the hammer while we are not looking is an attractive option!

If anyone wants to write some more PC DIY step by step articles they will be very welcome. Here are some topics as suggestions:

Hardware topics
How to fit a first/second hard disk drive and get it working first time.
How to buy and fit additional SDRAM.

Software topics
What to do when Windows 9x will only boot to safe mode.
How to install Linux.