While my Coolermaster CM 690 II is on its way to California, I have squeezed as much of my PC as possible into a totally inappropriate case.It has less structural integrity than the average aluminium food container but is a better option than leaving the parts loose on top of my desk.

The heat sink and fan assembly, a Coolermaster Hyper 212 sporting two fans protrudes beyond the perimeter of the case, forcing me to leave the side panel off. There is no side panel on the back either because I can’t fit enough fans into the case to keep it cool.

There is only one hard drive connected. The other two, both containing important files but not critical for daily use, have been put away until such time as I receive the replacement case. There simply isn’t enough room for them. With enough free bays to take five drives, four of them would place the drive across important motherboard connections, notably the front panel headers and SATA ports.

My old case reached the large UPS depot in Hodgins Illinois, just to the south of Chicago, and is the second stop in it’s US tour. Watching your parcel travel by any US carrier is akin to watching paint dry, but the routes taken can be a source of amusement. However, I don’t do ‘waiting’ very well on any day of the week, and I am eager to get all of my hard drives installed and working ASAP. In this instance, ASAP is looing to be dangerously close to April. Apparently, the case has to be inspected to ensure that any mad modding on my part has not affected it’s operational integrity. Somehow, I don’t think that the addition of an MVP sticker to the front panel is mad modding, so I don’t envisage any gasps of horror in the Coolermaster RMA depot, but they should be impressed by the way that I fixed down the front panel ground cable.

Patch Tuesday

I see that Internet Explorer 10 RTM is being piped through the updates now. IE 10 has caused no grief for me using Windows 8 and my Windows 7 Netbook had no issues with the beta, so I will assume that all is well. Of the two others, one is exclusively run on Firefox because Facebook games run better (so I am told), and my grand-daughter will no doubt bring IE 10 issues to me as she encounters them later today.

The rest of the patches all installed without any obvious side-effects, the computers rebooting back to desktop and no sign of error messages or boot looping.