After the great lightning strike of November 17th where everything plugged into a wall socket got zapped, I haven't had a PC in the dome, in fact we've only had one working PC in the house. Insurance took everything else away for inspection and reasonably quickly, everything was written off by their agents, it's taken this long for them to settle. They don't want to settle in cash, they want to supply replacement stuff, so the computers have been a sticking point for quite a few weeks.
They just couldn't get a replacement price on any of the computers as they where all custom built. The boys gaming PC had water cooling, I wanted a serial port on the dome PC like the old one, the media center needed both HDMI and optical out, they kept offering off the shelf HP computers which were not even close. On Thursday they finally caved in and are settling the computers in cash using the quotes I supplied a month ago.
So I couldn't wait for the cheque to get stuff working again, here's a pic of the new dome PC, all installed, just waiting for this case to arrive ->
http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=NzA0NTE1
It's a mini-ITX machine with an i3 chip and 8gig ram and will bolt to the wall of the obs. It has 8 usb ports and even has a serial port. I should get the case for it on Monday with a bit of luck.
I used that standard ATX power supply to fire it up, the Antec case comes with a 19v external laptop type supply.
Plenty of grunt in a tiny box
