Mac Build 2011- Day 2- Stripping the Case

The first challenge was removing all the Apple parts in the case. Some parts were held in in very weird and peculiar ways. All the screws were different for each component, which made it a pain to remove some parts. Most screw heads were Phillips, but some had Hex and Torx heads which luckily and I had the right size screw bits.

The first parts to come out were the CPU heatsink and fan. The heatsink was heavy and absolutely massive. I could now see all the screws holding the motherboard in place. There were a few cables to disconnect for the power, front IO, fans and hard drives, once these were removed the motherboard lifted out relatively easily.

I could now access the power supply in the bottom of the case. Again this was relatively easy to remove as it was only held in by a few of screws, however there are 4 to remove from the underside of the case. The Mac PSU is strange in that it covers the whole bottom of the case, but in doing so it is relatively thin.

I then hit a problem in that I couldn’t reach some screws that held the hard drive cage in place.

Mac Build 2011- Day 1- Motherboard Tray

The next thing I needed was a motherboard tray. A PowerMac motherboard is not ATX or any other standard you have heard of and so the screw mounts for the motherboard would be in completely the wrong places. Furthermore, the back IO ports and PCI slots were wrong as well.

Therefore a motherboard tray would be needed. The choice was ATX or mATX. Hours were spent on forums looking at other peoples builds and seeing how ATX and mATX fit inside the case with all the other parts such as power supply and hard drives in different places.

In the end I opted for ATX, since the motherboards are more common and offer better upgradability. I could only find 1 online store in the UK that sold a tray. Kustom PC’s sold a Lian Li tray for £27 and £7 postage. There was only 1 in stock so I had to buy it.

I also wanted an ATX motherboard which I could mount to the try for testing. I headed over to eBay and found an Asus one for £10 that may or may not have been working.

Mac Build 2011- Day 0- Finding a Case

The first task was to find a case. This was quite difficult so I headed over to eBay. Mac Pro cases didn’t really come up at all, but there were a fair few PowerMac’s from a few years ago. Some were being sold complete and working and others for spares and repair. However all I was interested in was the case, and finding one in good condition was tough with the size of eBay photos and whether what the seller thought was good condition, was actually good condition. Postage was another issue. These cases weigh the best part of 20KG and postage costs are quite high. Some people don’t offer to post at all.

After a couple of weeks I found a Buy It Now for a 1.6GHZ single core PowerMac, complete apart from RAM. It was sold for spares as someone poured coffee in it. For £50 this was a steal, postage was £20 but didn’t matter. Others seemed to be selling for £200+.

Mac Build 2011- Introduction

Over the summer I had an internship working at the University of Bristol and so I thought I’d give myself a small project to carry out in my spare time. After looking around on forums and finding it had been done many times before, I thought I’d have a go at converting a PowerMac / Mac Pro case for use with standard ATX parts.

However, from what I had seen of previous conversions, some jobs were pretty messy. My main aim was keeping the case tidy from the outside, with no unnecessary garish screw heads or rivets for example.

Throughout the project I took photos of each stage, which you can find here. I may host these elsewhere if there are issues viewing them.

Each day for the next 15 days I will post the next section of the build, in the order I carried them out in, and I’ll close with some final remarks of the project.

READ International Naked Calendar 2012

After the success of the University of Bristol Netball Club Calendar last year, I was invited to shoot the READ International calendar for 2012. The aim was to raise money for the book charity by selling the calendars to the students of Bristol.

The calendar contains many different societies:

• Men's Hockey
• Law
• Cheerleaders
• ARTofficial
• Computer Science
• Hispanic Society
• Cycling
• Geology and Geoscience
• Banking and Finance
• Mixed Lacrosse
• Chocolate Society
• Massage Society
• Wingardium Leviosoc
• The READ International organisers.

Each society shown doing what they do in all their glory.

Here is an previously unpublished shot of Computer Science:

More information about the calendar and READ International can be found on the READ Bristol Facebook Group or by emailing bristol@readbookproject.org.uk.

Speeding Up Logon

There's always things you can do to improve the startup time of your computer. Here is another.

If you have a password to logon to Windows, your startup programs are not loaded until after logging on. What I have looked into is a way to load these programs so that when you come to use your computer, they have already been loaded. Note that this will only work if there is only 1 user account on the computer.

The way to do this would seem to be to bypass the initial welcome / logon screen, then lock the computer.

The main challenge with this is skipping the welcome screen where you enter your password, yet keeping your account password.

To do this, Click Start, then Run, and type "netplwiz". This works on Windows 7 Professional, it should be the same for Vista and if you use XP use the command "Control Userpasswords2". This will open an Advanced User Accounts Window. Untick the box, "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer". You are no longer required to enter your password to logon but you still have the password on your account.

Next, you need to simulate locking the computer through the Command Prompt.
In a text editor, type the following:

@ECHO OFF
%windir%\system32\ribbons.scr /s
rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation
CLS
EXIT

The key line is the third. This will lock the computer. The second line is optional, it will run a screensaver if you so wish when you execute it.
In this example, when the file is run the "Ribbons" screensaver is started, then when the mouse is moved the lock screen is shown.

Save this text as a .bat file in your startup folder.

That is it, but there are a couple of small tweaks you can do. You will notice that when the file is executed, the Command Prompt is shown. In the file properties, on the Shortcut tab is a field "Run" which you can set to Minimised. If you so wish, you can also change the icon for the shortcut.

Restart your computer, it should automatically logon then present you with the lock screen, so when you come to use the computer your startup programs have already been loaded.

Windows 7- Installing on an SSD and another drive

Intro
More and more of us are buying SSDs to use in our computers due to their faster speeds, however you may not want to shell out a lot of money to get one of a decent size. This leaves you with the possibility of installing your OS on the SSD and use another (mechanical) drive for everything else, such as your files.
While this does work, I do not want to have to worry about which drive my program is going to install on, or where a picture is going to be saved. I want to run through an installer and not have to change anything, the same for saving documents. I want it all to be in the correct place.

Today I'm using Windows 7 x64 and a 60GB SSD, so all of the following is aimed at that. If you use x32, you are in luck, everything is the same and just miss out the commands that differentiate between 32 and 64 bit. If you still use Vista, everything should still apply.

I ventured online looking for some answers, most of which provided some registry changes to fool Windows as to where the users folder is located. The same for Program Files.

I then found a guide that allowed you to enter Command Prompt during a Windows install and make the changes there. However, they were a bit vague when it came to x64 installations and if you missed out a command, you may find yourself not being able to logon.

After about 5 or so attempts at installing Windows, I finally cracked it. I now have Windows on my SSD and users and program files on my Caviar Black. My SSD is drive C and my mechanical drive is D.

The Installation Changes
After Windows has copied all the files to disk you are prompted to restart. You are then greeted with a welcome screen where you can create a user account. At this point, press Shift + F10 to bring up a Command Prompt.

You then have 3 commands to enter. The first simply copies 1 directory to another. In this case, the users folder on the SSD to the mechanical drive. The second command removes the folder from the SSD and the final command creates a symbolic link between the two- so if anything tries to access C:\Users, it will actually be accessing D:\Users.

robocopy "C:\Users" "D:\Users" /E /COPYALL /XJ
rmdir "C:\users" /S /Q
mklink /J "C:\users" "D:\users"

These 3 commands can be repeated for the Program Files folder and if you're using x64, Program Files (x86).

robocopy "C:\Program Files" "D:\Program Files" /E /COPYALL /XJ
rmdir "C:\Program Files" /S /Q
mklink /J "C:\Program Files" "D:\Program Files"

robocopy "C:\Program Files (x86)" "D:\Program Files (x86)" /E /COPYALL /XJ
rmdir "C:\Program Files (x86)" /S /Q
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)" "D:\Program Files (x86)"

You have now successfully moved the files on disk, but according to Windows, they are still in the old locations. We now need to adjust the registry. In the Command Prompt, enter "regedit" to open Windows Registry Editor.

Go to the following locations, and replace 'D' with the letter of your mechanical drive.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]
"CommonFilesDir" = "D:\Program Files\Common Files"
"CommonFilesDir (x86)" = "D:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files"
"CommonW6432Dir" = "D:\Program Files\Common Files"
"ProgramFilesDir" = "D:\Program Files"
"ProgramFilesDir (x86)" = "D:\Program Files (X86)"
"ProgramW6432Dir" = "D:\Program Files"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList]
"Default" = "D:\Users\Default"
"ProfilesDirectory" = "D:\Users"
"Public" = "D:\Users\Public"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion]
"CommonFilesDir" = "D:\Program Files\Common Files"
"CommonFilesDir (x86)" = "D:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files"
"CommonW6432Dir" = "D:\Program Files\Common Files"
"ProgramFilesDir" = "D:\Program Files"
"ProgramFilesDir (x86)" = "D:\Program Files (X86)"
"ProgramW6432Dir" = "D:\Program Files"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileSet]
"Default" = "D:\Users\Default"
"ProfilesDirectory" = "D:\Users"

Once this is complete, exit the registry editor and the command prompt. You can now continue through the wizard to create your user account on drive D.
Once you're logged in, when you come to install a program it will be installed on drive D.
If you take a look on C:, you will see the symbolic links between the folders on the 2 drives.

The only things left on your SSD will be the Windows folder. I still have about 30GB free space, which I can use for caches etc, such as the Adobe Creative Suite cache.

Some of you may ask why have I moved the Program Files off of the SSD. Well, I have a relatively small SSD and don't want to have to think about whether this program should go on the SSD or elsewhere. Furthermore, most program .exe's are relatively small, so whether the amount of time saved by putting them on an SSD is questionable.

And finally, the changes for the registry can probably be put into a .reg file so you don't have to type them yourself. But after 5 failed installations, I was not in the mood to work this out.