Sub-£200 Hackintosh

Here are the specs of my soon-to-be-built hackintosh...

Pictures of Hard Drive Swap in Revo

Here are some pictures of swapping the hard drive in my Acer Aspire Revo.

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Netgear DGN2000 with o2 LLU Broadband

Here are the settings for if you want to replace the standard o2 Thomson modem/router with the Netgear DGN2000. These should be entered into the web interface.

Accessing ADSL Line Stats from o2 Wireless Box III

I can't find any easy way to access ADSL line stats through the o2-supplied "Wireless Box III" (a Thomson TG585n).

The only way that I could access them is by using this link.

Once you've got them, you can copy them into a stats checker such as this one.

This should all work with the standard "Administrator" user (no password), other functionality is available with the SuperUser user - password default is "O2Br0ad64nd".

Upgrading Memory in Acer Revo

Here are some quick instructions on upgrading the memory in an Acer Aspire Revo PC.

Pimp my Revo!

I've added some extra RAM and a new larger hard drive to my Acer Aspire Revo so here are the final specs: -

Swapping Hard Drive in Acer Revo

The Acer Aspire Revo has a lot of potential for a home media player but the 160gb hard drive won't be large enough for everybody.

I spotted a special offer on a Iomega Prestige 500gb Portable Hard Drive which contains (in my case) a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 drive, model ST9500325AS .

I already had a working installation of Windows 7 RC, so here's how I swapped the hard drives: -

Opening the Acer Aspire Revo

There's a useful page on opening the Acer Aspire Revo here. Will come in useful for when I add an extra 1GB RAM to the existing 1GB, or maybe swapping the hard drive for a larger one.

Installing Windows 7 on Acer Aspire Revo

Here are some instructions for installing Windows 7 RC onto the Acer Aspire Revo.

Power Consumption of Acer Aspire Revo

I did some quick tests on the power consumption of my Acer Aspire Revo R3600 which arrived yesterday.

Linksys WRT54GL Super Router

I've recently bought a Linksys WRT54GL Router. This is a great little unit that allows you to upload custom firmware.

After playing around with DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato, I finally settled on Tomato. The features are too many to list here so here's a link to the Wiki.

There's also a great article on Lifehacker here.

Nintendo DS Lite Homebrew

I have a DS Lite, and its great for running homebrew applications. The easiest way to do this is by buying a TopToy DSTT Multimedia Card (like this one) together with a compatible Micro SD card (such as this one).

After this, its a simple matter of downloading the software, copying the DSTT files onto the Micro SD card, and copying some homebrew software onto it. There's a great run-down of popular homebrew applications here.

Hard Drive for QNAP TS-101

Unfortunately, the QNAP Compatibility List doesn't have any Samsung drives listed as being tested, so I've had to try another brand in my TS-101.

I've opted for a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 500-GB Hard Drive which seems to get good reviews.

Hopefully it will support spin-down - I'll report more when I've tried it.

QNAP TS-101 Telnet Access

The latest firmware (2.3.0 Build 080618) for the QNAP TS-101 has telnet enabled by default.

To access the device, use something like PuTTY to connect via port 13131. The user name is "administrator", and the password is the administrator that you set via the QNAP web interface.

QNAP TS-101 Introduction

I've just received my new I've just acquired a QNAP TS-101 from ebay. It's main features are: -

Changing Speedtouch 585 to Bridged Mode

I have internet access (24 Meg ADSL) from Be that comes with a free Speedtouch 585 Wireless Modem/Router (aka BeBox). Unfortunately, while it's great for connecting via ADSL2+, it's not that good at anything else.

I much prefer my Linksys WRT54GL for general network stuff, running Tomato firmware.

All is not lost - it's fairly easy to set the BeBox to work in "Bridged mode": -