Finishing touches, I mean, touchs

Before I got down to the business of installing Windows, I opened up the case and made a few final changes.

First, I powered up the machine and pressed the button for the optical drive door in the front of the case. If the door hadn't opened, I would have removed the optical drive cage and installed what the Lian Li instructions called a "rubber" on to the door button of the optical drive, although I would have probably installed it on the button on the inside of the case. The rubber is a square of rubber with an adhesive sticker on one side. It is in the bag of parts that came with the case. Fortunately, the door opened, so I moved on.

Next, I applied the vanity stickers that came with the CPU and the power supply to the front of the case.

Then I opened up the case and began to locate connectors that didn't plug into anything. I covered these with black electrical tape. It is unlikely that the connector will come into contact with anything conductive, but why take chances? There are probably caps that can be bought to do this job, but the electrical tape seems good enough.

Next I looked at what my mother would call a "rats nest" of wires underneath the hard drive cage. I was so focused on getting the wires plugged into the right place, that I didn't notice the crisscrossed mess I was making with them. The biggest problem with them was with the 22-pin power supply cable, so I disconnected it from the motherboard, untangled it from the various wires that were going above and below it, reran it under everything, and plugged it back in. There is a set of four cables coming out of the front of the case: the HD Audio, 2 USB, and IEEE 1394 cables. Running the 22-pin power cable under these helped hold the power cable close to the case bottom. A large clamp with adhesive sticker case with the case. I slipped it over the 22-pin cable and stuck the clamp to the case bottom to hold the cable even more firmly in place. Finally, I placed the 8-pin power cable into the clamp as well and closed the clamp.

Then, I took a small tie-wrap that came with the case and placed it around the small wires for the power button, reset button, hard drive LED and power LED.

Finally, I removed the IDE ribbon cable, straighten it out a bit and plugged it back it. It laid too close to the AMD SB700 clip for my taste, so I turned it such that it was standing on its side, rather than laying on its back.

You may have other house keeping chores that you want to do, that will be your call. (You may also feel like, "It runs, lets move on". Again your call.) Either way, it's time on install the OS.