Ok so the parts arrived finally. While I love Newegg’s competitive prices the shipping factor usually dampens my enthusiasm, not only is shipping a bit more expensive but it is also slower since everything comes from the states even when ordering from the Canadian site.
- The new parts:
Only the motherboard and the Trendnet switch were bought from Newegg, the rest I had already bought from NCIX.
The gigabit switch (TEG-S50G) combined with the gigabit integrated NICs in the server’s new motherboard and desktop will finally give me a gigabit connection. I have also used the switch to segregate the three hubs on the network, although this is not a big deal since the vast majority of traffic is between the desktop and server. I do hope to change this and setup a backup system for the house’s laptops as well.
While I have no clue as to the electrical merits of this power supply, a Antec Earthwatts 500W, it is from a brand name I trust and what reviews I read gave it great praise. One thing I do know is that it has a ton of connectors, I can only wish I had as many SATA drives as this thing has SATA power cables. Its also a 80+ rated power supply which is nice since this server is on twenty four seven.
The mother board is a ECS A740GM-M, I choose this one because it was the cheapest shipped with a gigabit nic and has plenty of SATA ports. One down side is that I had to go down to two gigabytes of RAM since it only had two DIMM sockets. This hopefully will not be an issue since the server never went over 1.4 gigabytes before.
- The disasembly:
Before shot:
Half way shot:
Before wiring:
Completed:
Over all everything was really uneventful. The only program I ran into was that the motherboard maker, ECS Elitegroup, in an attept to make the motherboard as multilingual as possible did not mark the power on, restart and LED plugs on the board itself. Instead they provided a large cheat sheet in Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and a few others including English if you can find it. All this and they still only call the plugs by their abbreviated English names like “PWR” plus a translated introduction to what it actually is. Basically why they did not simply print it on the motherboard is beyond me.
- Trouble shooting:
Now onto the fun part, its not as if something would ever work just the way you want it to right out of the box eh? This time though the configuration issues were minor which may just be that I’m getting better at this. I opted to reuse the Windows installation from before the rebuild since even though I have read posts otherwise I have never had an issuse running windows with changed hardware. Once I booted the computer up Windows started searching for drivers. It found what it needed for everything except the integrated Ethernet. Luckily for me I had installed the wireless drivers for my wireless dongle a while ago. So I check the NIC’s id from the device manager and feed it to google. The first search result was some find-all-drivers program, with a free trial, I skiped that. Next result had the drivers with a direct download link. I grabed that and tried to install it, the installer ran but nothing came up. I moved on but then I notice something, there were two Windows security icons. I already knew that this was a tactic of scareware, my suspicion is confirmed soon when one of the icons informs me that I have been infected with a “virus” no less. First thing I did was of course pull out the wireless dongle, without internet access I have plenty of time. Next I killed the proces, a 123643.exe, seriously why would someone use such a unique name, no other process ever uses a random string of numbers. Then I go into msconfig and untick the autostartup, I also take a look in program files but in this case the programmer was not as obvious. I then rebooted the system. All that is left now besides some never to be executed binaries is the server’s new desktop wall paper. It looks kind of cool I must say although I will never see it since I always RDP into the headless server with wallpapers turned off: 
After that I got back to looking for the driver and fianlly found it on ECS’s website. For some reason only the audio drivers and new bios show up when you search the downloads section for this motherboard, you have to go to the motherboard’s product page to find the other drivers. All this and later I find that there was a driver CD hidden inside the manual.
The next problem to fix is the fans. For some reason the case fan and the cpu fan which both plug directly into the motherboard are always on high. Turns out even though the BIOs lists fan settings none of them do anything, the fans always get max voltage. I also tried speedfan, while the fans may have been loud they were doing a great job, the cpu was running at 29 Celsius. Although I do suspect the motherboards heat sensors to be a little, off, temp sensor three was apparently at negative one hundred and thirty two. My solution to this annoying bug was to replace the heatsinks fan with a larger one that would run much quieter at the same voltage and to unplug the case fan.
Now all that is left is to hook up the TV Tuner but I’ll leave that. So here is the finished product my “server” room in all its techy glory:
