Finished project…

Tonight I finished up a project that I’ve been working on. My cousin departs for Arlington, VA at the end of the month and he will be living on his own for the first time. He’s going out there to pursue a music career while working at a day job, and I decided that I would cobble him together a computer from some of my old components so he had a way to communicate when he’s eating his Ramen noodles with his drinking buddies.

This whole thing was fraught with frustrations and setbacks, but in the end I was able to upgrade it sufficiently so that it could support some of the basic tasks he’ll need to undertake. The final step that I finished a bit ago was oiling the fans… this machine is an old Pentium II Socket A processor, and the fan that was attached to the heatsink was LOUD. Really loud.

For those of you that don’t know how to do this, I will explain. Unscrew the offending case fan after turning off your machine. Peel back the sticker on the non-spinny area of the fan, exposing a small circular indentation where the bearings are. Some fans have a small rubber plug in there that must be removed in order to oil it correctly. Put a few drops of three-in-one all purpose oil in there and manually turn the fan a few times to make sure it coats the bearings appropriately. Reappoint the plug and/or sticker and reattach the fan as normal.

You can restore many very noisy fans very easily with a $3 bottle of oil and it is a nice maintenance step to perform once in awhile.

Now that this is done, the project is over. My cousin will take his machine tomorrow and before we know it be pretty darned far away. Hopefully he can wardrive a wireless network to hook up to so I can chat with him occassionally.