I'm sorry for the lack of pictures on this part. The only thing I have to take them with is a 3com web cam and it just didn't do a good job on showing the cables. I wiped off my old Photoshop skills and made the following picture for you guys.
The top line is a normal IDE cable. The first step is
to fold it in half like the 2nd line. I hope you're following this so far
because the hard part is coming up. Now take the two sides of the cable and
fold them back into a W. Grab your pack of zip ties and zip the cable up. I
used 5 zip ties on each IDE cable. Here is a picture of what the finished cable
should look like.
Repeat that process for all of your cables and within about 10 minutes your done. Now go over to your friend's house, drink his beer and laugh at him when he cuts his finger trying to make his round cables. Speaking of beer, I'll be right back.
This typing stuff makes me thirsty. Ok, I'm back now
with Red Stripe in hand. Because of possible interference problems on higher
speed buses, do this at your own risk on ATA66/100 and SCSI cables. The good
thing is that if it doesn't work you can just cut the zip ties off and you have
your good cable back. Since I am refreshed we have time to move on to the case
modifications.
Let's discuss airflow in a case. A normal case has a
power supply fan at the top rear and a case fan at bottom front. Ideally you
want a direct path for the air to come in the front and exit the rear. I'll
cover the fundamentals before we move on to the difficult work. Make sure that
your fans are blowing in the right directions. The front fan should blow in and
the power supply fan should blow out. Don't assume that they are correct. For
instance on this 250 watt Power Supply the fan was blowing in so I had to
reverse it. We have the air flowing right so now look at your case and all of
the holes in it. If your case is anything like mine it will have all kinds of
holes. These two pictures show the bigger holes in my case.
Looking at the first picture you can see grilles at the
top of the case and right below the power supply. Now think about how we want
the air to flow in the case. Those holes allow air to come right in and then go
out the power supply. This is not a good thing and not conductive to our air
flow plans. Now those people that like using razors on their cables would
probably get out the MIG welder and weld 1/4 inch thick steel plates over these
holes. We are smarter than they are and grab the nearest roll of duct tape.