I have an old SparcClassic X which is next to useless and I have been using as a foot rest for a while. So I decided to upgrade it a little using my Mini-ITX board that I am currently running as a home server.

First of all take out all the insides. You have to break a few plastic welds to get out the IO board and a couple more to get the tin sheilding out as shown here.

Next go at it with the hoover and then some kitchen paper and soap to get rid of 20 years of grime!

You now need to make a small adjustment to the back of the box. I have cut out as little a possiable to make the back of the Mini-ITX board fit in place. It was just a little too wide and si I also had to remove some of the FAN cover as well.

Note: This is not quite complete as I had to remove a small section from the top to allow space for a UBS2 card that I attach my disks to.

Here you can see how it all fits in quite neatly. I had to make a small adjustment to the PCI card so that the lid will fit on but all in all pretty simple.

I have put the tin sheilding back in now and made some board mounts out of wood! For the moment they are just blu-tacked in place but I may replace them with something a bit more in keeping or just glue them down.

Here it is all asslembled. I have the HDD in place on it's side and a fan in the lid. Note also the PSU board that takes up the rest of the space in the back of the box.

You can't quite see it here but after cleaning out large lumps of dust from under the CPU fan it now touches the heatsink, for now I have a bit of paper proping it up but I may have to get a rubber washer to raise it and also cut down on the noise a bit.

For now I have used Acustic damping Drive fixers or Blu-Tack to mount the HDD. This is going to have to change for two reasons. One being that it will probably go off with the heat from the HDD and fall over. The second being that it is just a little too tall and so the lid does not quite fit on!

Can't decide if I should mount it in the lid, replace it with a 2.5" drive or use that CF-IDE adapter to rig for silent running!