HACK
YOUR HARDWARE
W
ith the improved productivity soft ware on smartphones and the
iPhone, there’s almost no reason to have a dedicated PDA that
you can’t also make calls on. Of course, that leaves early adopters who
bought Dell Axims and HP iPAQs in the great PDA surge of 2000 with pricey paperweights
and plenty of remorse.
That is, unless you put that old PDA to use in some other fashion. You can, for instance,
turn the device into a secondary monitor. Any PocketPC/WindowsCE PDA that uses Micro-
soft ’s ActiveSync soft ware can be reprogrammed to serve as a desktop extension to give you
just a little more screen space (image A). To do this, we used a program called SideWindow,
($15, http://tinyurl.com/2pyuj8).
Installing the app is just a matter of connecting your PDA to its cradle, launching Active-
Sync, and running the SideWindow executable. With the program installed, we launched its
confi guration utility and adjusted the display resolution (image B). Most PocketPCs have a na-
tive resolution of 240x320, but SideWindow can scale a virtual resolution of up to 768x
to fi t your screen. Our Dell Axim X50v actually has a native resolution of 480x640, but we
found that anything above 300x400 made text very diffi cult to read.
Windows treated our PDA like any other monitor, so we could arrange it to either the
left or right of our primary display and extend our desktop accordingly. Since the hack runs
display information over USB, there can be a bit of lag when moving objects around in the new
window—we don’t recommend watching video on the PDA screen! SideWindow is best for
keeping tabs on buddy lists or cheat codes when playing games, hosting to-do lists, and dis-
playing media player information when running a movie at full screen (just drag the desired
windows over to the new screen).32 | MAXIMUMPC | JUL 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
NOVICE
Use an Old PDA as a Second
Monitor
JOURNEYMAN
Silence Your Hard DrivesA
side from your CPU fan,
one of the noisiest components in your PC is the hard drive.
Spinning platters can rattle the drive against its mounting bracket.
Some cases, such as Cooler Master’s Cosmos 1000, come with
hard drive racks that already sport rubber dampeners (image A),
but adding some of your own is fairly easy too. We’ve found that
rubber washers are eff ective at cushioning a drive and taming its
noise output. Hardware stores sell rubber washers fairly cheaply,
but in our experience the premade variety are oft en either too thick or have too large an internal diameter
for tiny hard-drive-cage screws. So we make our own rubber washers by cutting them out of thin rubber
strips. A roll of linerless rubber splicer tape will do the job and is available at Home Depot for $3 a pop.
Use a dime as a stencil for your washers and trace and cut several circles from the tape (image B). The rub-
ber liner tape is 0.03 inches thick, so you should stack two washers to create an eff ective dampener. Cut a
small hole in the middle with a knife or tiny hole-punch (image C). Affi x these washers between the hard
drive and the mounting rack of your case (image D). The rubber washers serve as a buff er between the
metal of your drive and case to prevent noise from reverberating through the case.b
bought Dell Axims and HP iPAQs in the great PDA surge of 2000 with pricey paperweightsThat is, unless you put that old PDA to use in some other fashion. You can, for instance,
turn the device into a secondary monitor. Any PocketPC/WindowsCE PDA that uses Micro-b
a
b
but in our experience the premade variety are oft en either too thick or have too large an internal diameter
for tiny hard-drive-cage screws. So we make our own rubber washers by cutting them out of thin rubber
strips. A roll of linerless rubber splicer tape will do the job and is available at Home Depot for $3 a pop.
Use a dime as a stencil for your washers and trace and cut several circles from the tape (image B). The rub-
ber liner tape is 0.03 inches thick, so you should stack two washers to create an eff ective dampener. Cut ac
32 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| JUL 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
d
one of the noisiest components in your PC is the hard drive.
Spinning platters can rattle the drive against its mounting bracket.
Some cases, such as Cooler Master’s Cosmos 1000, come with
hard drive racks that already sport rubber dampeners (image A),
but adding some of your own is fairly easy too. We’ve found thata