I’ve been futzing around with my toys lately and have been doing some work:

–Tonight, I repaired my Treo 650 (which probably is due for a replacement, all things considered). The ear speaker had stopped working some time ago — not a big deal to me because I typically use a Bluetooth earpiece and honestly don’t use a cell phone very much, but still annoying.

This required disassembling the Treo, removing the old ear speaker and putting in a new one (actually, I stole one from a Treo I accidentally crushed in a car door about a year ago). Here’s a YouTube video that shows how to take the Treo apart. If prying apart cell phones with trim sticks and carefully removing ribbon cables makes you nervous, don’t do this.

How geeky am I? Not that geeky on any real scale but yes, I do own my very own Torx multi-driver set (seen here). Torx is the Phillips-head-on-steroids type of screw head that’s designed to keep normal, healthy folks from opening up and breaking their electronics. When you start buying Torx multi-drivers just so you can get into your cell phones and iPods, you have a problem.

I did all of this just a little while after I completely disassembled my Frankenputer and put it in a new NZXT Hush case. The name pretty much gives away the purpose of the case — it’s designed to significantly cut noise. With its big, slow-speed fans, acoustic insulation and no side vents, it performs as advertised. Coupled with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 (a bulky-but-cheap quiet CPU cooler that I bought recently after my last cooler blew up) and a quiet power supply, you can hear only the tiniest bit of fan noise out of my system these days. I’m very happy with the case and I like the fact that the door is hinged on the left instead of the right (the computer storage shelf on my desk is on the lower right, and hinging it this way means the door opens away from me instead of toward me).

Swapping out a case requires you to tear your computer down to the bone, reassemble everything and pray things work, but my system did (more or less) the first time. It’s a sweet case, too.