I used to keep a lot of old computers and parts around for no real reason, starting with my very first computer in 1999, Elyham, which served me for about five years until Azmaria, built in 2004, which was succeeded by Nanoha, my current machine, in 2009. Five years seems about the average turnaround time for my computers, and even after I’ve built a new one, I tend to keep them in use as a webserver or some other project until they’re fully decommissioned.

When I built Nanoha back in 2009, I used the Gigabyte motherboard out of the computer I got from school to form the basis for her. It became the only part from that build that stayed with the new build, having bought a faster CPU, GPU, larger PSU, going to SATA for drives, really everything. So I was left with enough parts to build another computer provided I either bought a new board for Nanoha or a new board for those parts. Time passed and I didn’t care as much, always intending to buy it to create a media PC for the front room from those parts. By now, everything has gone to Intel i3/5/7, DDR3, and so on, so finding boards for older Core2/DDR2, while not impossible, was a bit trickier. Fortunately when I went onto Newegg last week to buy a PSU for a computer I was diagnosing, I found a cheap open-box MSI board that would fit the bill perfectly for ~35 bucks and bought it. The bonus was the PSU I bought turned out not to be the cause of the issues with a computer I was fixing, so I had all the parts to build up that PC. Only trouble was, the only case I had was Azmaria, which had been gutted for its PSU to test on another machine months past, and I also stole the DVD drive for my machine at work. Rather than order a new case, I took all of the remaining parts out, cleaned it up, and installed all the new parts. “The Hamster Cage”, as my girlfriend once dubbed it when we started dating, was alive again, with a slower-but-steady Core2 1.8GHZ, GeForce 7000 series GPU, 2GB(2x1GB) of RAM (it can hold 2x4GB, I will likely buy 2x2GB for 4GB total), and a 80GB SATA running Windows 7 Ultimate on it. Dubbed “Reinforce Zwei” or simply REINFORCE on the network, for the moment it just has MPC-HC, Winamp, and Chrome for video, audio, and Netflix if I don’t want to switch on one of the consoles.

In an interesting twist, I tried a different setup with MPC-HC, using a fansubber’s guide to setting it up with LAV rather than the traditional ffdshow that comes with CCCP or CoreAVC. I did install Haali and ffdshow as they mention in the guide, but only to handle the 10% of other media I have that LAV won’t, which isn’t much since most of my anime and TV shows are either in h264/x264 MKVs or XVID AVIs. I imagine the only ones that might have trouble would be the older fansubs from pre-2008 or 2009-ish before the h264/x264 era kicked in. I skipped out on madVR, as it seems to work pretty well without it. I haven’t tested it on full 1080p BD rips yet, but it was playing 1080p MKVs pretty well. The only issue I believe is that the screenshot functions may not work, so I may not adopt this on my regular computer quite yet, but then I don’t think it’s a big deal because my machine handles just about everything short of some dense 1080 BDs, and I use the screenshots for the animu blog. The media system though doesn’t need it. As for future plans for this system, I’ve thought about using it as primary storage for video media, possibly assemble a storage system for it and dump all of my CD/DVD media to HDs accessible either internally or get a USB SATA dock to plug-and-play on. We’ll see how that turns out. I also want to explore better options for the controls, right now I have a wireless keyboard/trackpad mouse that works, but it’s a bit flaky at times, and I kinda want either a remote or maybe a gyroscopic mouse, similar to this, though I wonder if there is a way to cook up some magic with either the Wiimotes, or the Kinect. That would be fun.

Finally, I used some of the holiday weekend to fix up the office a little bit, moving the large bookcase we moved in here from the living room after the new couch went in to the corner next to her closet, and filled it with 95% her books and 5% my large/heavy books from my shelf. I then moved my bookcase to the center inbetween our computers and put the printer on the top, followed by my artbooks, comics, and manga on the bottom, and anime and Disgaea figures on the top. I took the remaining shelves her books used to be on and put all of her dragon and giraffe stuff on it. I finished by moving a portion of her stuffed animals and giraffes (pattern here?) to the shelf she put on the wall next to the media bookshelf out in the living room. It seemed to work out well and open up the room space a little. I’d like to find some kind of small hobby or craft table to place on either side of my desk to use for doing some things on, namely acquiring and building a model USS Defiant. I also want to set to work on repainting some Nerf guns for Katsucon next year, and some Gundam models. I’m hoping to find something either on wheels so it can be moved around as needed, or something portable that can be stowed away when not being used. We’ll see what I can cough up.

Never a dull moment around here I suppose.