Posts Tagged ‘hardware’

I bought a new case a few weeks ago, The Cooler Master Elite 360. I have gone through my share of computer cases in my time, and the Elite 360 by Cooler Master has been one of the better in the lot. To begin with it is has a screwless design for optical and hard drive bays which actually works. I have had screwless designed cases before and usually found that my optical drives would stick out a bit or not enough, or that the fit for hard drives was to tight, and the screwless mechanisms would jam.  No the Elite 360. It comes with side stripes that you plug into the screw holes of your drive and slides right in and with a click their are firmly secured. The case also has a versicle design that it can stand up like a tower, or sit down like a desktop.  I sit it down and slid it into the vc/dvd player space of an old TV stand I use for my computer equipment. It can handle both ATX and Mico ATX, and was one of the more easier cases to build a system with. The one down side is my MicroATX motherboard comes right to the edge of where the 3.5 bay for a flopy sits. I tried fitting a regular sized hard drive there, but found that edge of the mother board allowed for no room to plug in the sata or power cables, where the IDE connector was in the way. However, that really cannot be faulted to the Case. It did fit an old full size ATX motherboard, which shortly gave up the ghost (that is when I moved my main system into it.)  It comes with one 120mm fan which is nice and quite with good airflow, and has additional room for a second 120mm fan above the CPU and a 92mm fan on the left (when laying down as a desktop).  the one thing I would have liked is if it where made of Aluminum instead of steel. Check it out at NewEgg.com

The QuickCam c500 is supported out of the box in Debian Squeeze by the UVC driver. However, one issue I have encountered is the built in microphone is auto detected by alas and overrides my sound card, forcing me to issue the command (as root):

alsa force-reload

to solve this problem edit /etc/modprobe.d/sound.conf and add:

options snd_usb_audio index=1

Reboot and hopefully all is well.