Saturday, February 11, 2006

 

Take that, Dell!

Being someone that's "worked" in the IT industry since 1986, I always like to think I actually know what I'm doing as far as computers are concerned. This is combined with being a tight bastard and results in taking advantage of special offers on Dell's website so all the family PCs are cheap servers. The problem is that Dell want you to buy such machines for running your business on and NOT for the home - they have lots of perfectly lovely machines for that market but they are obviously more expensive. Apparently Dell had been burnt by people with a few brain cells buying the cheap servers and chucking in a powerful video card to make a games machine for less than Dell could. To get round this, they decided to make it physically impossible to make use of the PCI Express slot on the motherboard by making them differently:


The two bits of plastic on the right mean you can only fit a half-length video card into this slot. Can you find a half-length PCI Express video card? No, of course you can't as they don't exist any longer (assuming they ever did). And even if they did, Dell don't support the fitting of such a device. What bastards.


But luckily the Internet is at hand with a solution! You declare war on the plastic bits. I didn't go the whole hog and buy a propane torch to heat up the knife like Dan did. Instead I searched the loft and found a Stanley knife and started hacking away.

This seemed to be okay to start with but I soon realised that it wouldn't work too well the deeper I carved so I started looking in the kitchen for something more useful.

 

A Kitchen Devil with handy saw action was just what I needed and soon the evil work of the manufacturer was undone. Samantha would soon know the delight of graphics unknown to the on-board chip-set!


Comments: Post a Comment



Links to this post:

Create a Link



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Subscribe to Posts [Atom]