I was reading in the Anandtech forums about clear cases when I got a great idea. How about a flat PC? I could stick it under my desk to the side and it would be completely out of the way.
I headed out to the garage, grabbed a hacksaw and a piece of leftover 1/8in plywood, and began to make a mockup.
After nearly severing my finger (that part isn’t essential) in the process, I headed back to the house with my plywood. I ripped my PC apart and scattered the piece all over the plywood.
Now where do the pieces go? After a little bit of playing, I realized that to keep this PC under 3ft by 3ft; I needed to rip my old case apart and use the metal to stack my drives.
Hours of great labor later, I get the old PC apart and have most of my new PC screwed down. I get it all on the board and I plug it in hoping nothing dramatic happens.
Well, she boots up fine.
OK, time to move it to a more convenient position. So I pick it up and lay it against a wall where I was working.
As I was standing it up, I realized that all the heavy components had been (and needed to be) attached to one side. My thin piece of plywood bent like a C.
It also fell over several times and I prayed to Seagate that my Q3 didn’t get fragged from a head crash.
So I finally fired it up again, still works. I’m tired after all this work, so I head down stairs and fired up the TV.
Every single station had huge amounts of interference on it. I run upstairs, turn the PC off, sure ’nuff the interference is gone.
Oh, well. I’ll take it to my college apartment where I have cable (wonder if I can get a commission from the cable company :)).
So I load up the PC in my car (after much work and some pretty funny looks from the neighbors), and head over to the apartment.
I get there and realize that the PC that my new casing will not work on the side of the desk the way I want it. All the connectors will be at the bottom and I’ll be back to praying to Seagate regularly.
“Sigh.” Off to buy a brand new ATX case…
Editorial note: Shielding something like this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Joe Citarella has done some things similiar to this. When he gets back from vacation, I’ll ask him to write about his experience. –Ed
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