Don't you hate people that make proprietary cases? Gateway, HP, and I think Dell are 3 different brands i've encountered that do this. They make their stuff so that only THEY can use it.
And it's not just things on the motherboard. They go out of their way to really screw you over if you ever want to upgrade.
Case in point: This weekend I upgraded my sister's HP machine. It was an old 1.5GHz P3 with 256 RDRAM and a GeForce 256 (or something equivelant). She got my old mobo, a celery 2.5GHz, 512MB RAM (albeit, DDR PC2100, but still better than nothing), and a MX440 GeForce.
Now, it
could have been worse. At least the back plate came off and accepted the new mobo's plate. My old gateway case had STAMPED STEEL in this spot. However, things like the front panel I/O are retarded. They take the standard 2x4+1 USB header plug and make it a 2x6 plug, only the extra grounds (it turns out) are on the front, and after the first pair of pins it has an empty row, then puts in the other 3 rows.
Well a dremel tool and some careful chopping got it to fit on a
standard USB header, but there I find out (by comparing the wire colors to a "normal" header plug) that they moved the extra ground wires to the left side instead of the right. Still easily overcome by shifting the plug 1 row off the edge of the pins.
Then there's the case plug. Switch, power LED, and IDE LED. They're all on the same piece of plastic, that fits perfectly on the HP mobo but I bet no other mobo on the planet. More dremel work and separating the individual pins from each other, and it works. However it's still a pain. The power LED doesn't work because it has 3 pins, and needs pins 1 and 3, but the case uses pins 2 and 3. I haven't cut them apart just yet, but I may do so in the future, to get it working (heck, it's just the green light on the power switch, not that important).
There's lots of little things like this that really screw most folks over when they want to do anything to their PC. These companies think that the PC is always theirs, and that we're just "renting" it. My philosophy is that a PC is like a car (no, no, stick with me here!) -- you want to keep it running well, because you need it. You want to replace parts if they get worn out.
Well what if you bought a car that didn't allow you to take anything out, didn't allow you to put anything in, and forced you to ride the same tires until they catastrophically blew out while you were driving it? Then when that happened they say "sorry, you need a new car, but for $1,499.99 you can upgrade to a much faster model!"
It's pathetic.
To make things worse, her PSU fan died. Hell if I know when. She said it was making loud noises, I'm guessing that was it. Luckily I have a JustPC PSU that was pure crap, I open it up, take its fan out, and put it in the other PSU. It takes a little bit of work to rig it to a standard MOLEX adapter and then run the wire out of the case with all the other wires, then close the case.
So basically I told her she's got a bit of a Frankenstein, but at least you can't see any of that from the outside
