As some of you will undoubtedly remember, I haven't been having stellar luck with the hardware I ordered from TigerDirect. The CPU cooler doesn't seem to be properly cooling the Athlon64 (though I seem to have got it to the point where it's stable and reliable, though still 10 degrees warmer than it really should be), and the power switch on the new case for the old Athlon (original, not even Athlon-XP) only works one time in 50 or so.

So, since I was up almost an hour early (I don't sleep well these days :( ) this morning, I decided to rip the power switch out of Shiva's old PII (which she gave me as a cast-off when she upgraded to a new Dell) and use it to turn on the machine and get it configured so that at the very least it's a usable backup machine for me.

Turns out, however, that the PII-era power switches are wired, not to the motherboard as signals to be interpreted by the BIOS, but are instead huge constructs that look like something out of a Lada's electrical system, with this particular one being at least 6 or 7 centimeters long with various parts of the switch formed by the moldings of the case.

However, it did have a reset button that looks just like a modern reset button. For those who haven't built their own machine, reset and power buttons are attached to the motherboard with wires and do nothing more complex than bridging across two contact posts, which sends the signal to the BIOS to do whatever it's been programmed to do.

Anyway, wound up prying the reset button out (they get glued into place, normally) and running it out of a ventilation gap in the new case. I think it looks horrific, but Rosey couldn't even see it when I pointed it out to her, so it can't be all that bad. The white part is the glob of glue that covers the back of the switch and holds everything together, btw.