Had a Bad Day
Well, maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t received my package at 4:55 PM yesterday. Shuttle’s are small, and it’s really hard to get the motherboard out. Okay, once you figure out that you have to disassemble the WHOLE case (front plate, probably back plate… stuff you normally don’t have to take off), it’s easy. Let’s just say, it took just under two hours to get the board out. The new board slid in okay (the screws are impossible to reach straight up-and-down, so it actually required me to crossthread one).
Then, I broke the switch cable tying the main power switch to the header on the motherboard. I would blame this on the tight fit of the motherboard (30%) and shoddy manufacturing (70%). Yeah, you think I’m complaining. It was frickin’ hot glued to the front mount. Yeah. Frickin’ hot glued. A $300 case-motherboard combo with a cheap chipset and they hot glue the switch.
So, I’m not a pansy. I know what to do. I get some alligator cables, some thin-gauge wire, and my soldering iron. I managed to identify the correct pins and soldered on the wire. Then the heat from the soldering iron snapped the el cheapo lugs on the switch.
Fudge it. Fudge it to heck (I’ve changed, I’m trying).
I’m going to try to sell them back their board and buy a mid-tower, a real graphics card, and a real frickin’ motherboard. If they won’t take it back, I’m going to try to buy a new switch and repair the machine, then buy the same stuff I was going to anyway and use that.
Heck, I might even buy a new hard drive just so they can shove it all up their butts.