LED mod on I6000D

Hi

Here are some photos of my LED mod on my I6000. I originally got the idea from Spike. Unfortunately, I could not find any tutorials for this so I decided to attempt it with the bare facts that I’m supposed to take power from the USB port. It was not too hard of a mod to do. You will however need a low knowledge of electrical engineering. The led's I used were not too good. I picked them up from the local surplus store. They are supposed to be "high intensity" 100mA red led's. I also picked up a 120 ohm resistor because the safe voltage for the led's are at 3-3.5v and the usb port is at 5. I might write a new guide for this mod since there are few tutorials and the outcome is ]pretty cool. Hope you enjoy my pics

UPDATE:Ok, so now I know how bad my led's suck. I went over to Radio Shack and bought a 2$ , 3000mcd led wondering the difference in light intensity compaired to my current $.25 led's....The difference was amazing. The light from the radio shack one was crazy! I think I'm going to either buy 5 radio shack ones OR buy 50 or 100 12,000 MCD led's of ebay!!! The 12,000 ones may be over kill and distract me from my hw, coding, gaming, ect.....lol

UPDATE AGAIN: I just ordered 100 6000mcd blue 5mm led for $9 off ebay They should be here in a week. Since it will be spring break for me, I'll probably write a guide to doing this mod

UPDATE 4/1/06: Got my new blue led's !!!! WOW, they are so BRIGHT!! They look better in real life then they do in the photos.

Before


After

Thanks The hardest parts were finding places to hide the resistor and clumps of wire. Actually, I had to unleash my 35,000rpm rotary tool on the case...lol...It's not as bad as you think. I just had to chop a little segment out of the aluminum under the lap rest to fit some wires. Now that I think about it, I probably could have avoided the cutting by using thinner wires. I originally used "large" wires but then realized that they would not fit and ended up using thinner wires for the rest of the project.

It gives the laptop a nice gaming feeling IMO. The blue 6000mcd led's will be about 10x brighter then the current ones i have.

Yeah, I plan on making a guide for this. I could not find ANY guides to do this. Spike used to have one, but then he rebuilt his website

For the I9300, can't you exchange the fan/speakers with that of an xps gen2/m170? or is the motherboard different. I saw the motherboard for the xps m170. It has a seperate port for controling the led's

Thats pretty cool. I kinda wish that I had gone with a 9300 instead of the i6000d because of the 6800, and now, the 7800gtx . I guess the reason was because there was quite a large price difference at the time. Other then the graphics card, my i6000 is really nice. Maybe.....I'll be able to add a mobility x1400, but that won't add much performance.

I'd say the hardest parts are:

#3. Fitting the resistor into the case.

#2. Arranging the wires such that the palm rest will fit.

#1. Soldering the 2 wires onto the usb port. It would 10x easier if there was MORE SPACE!

That would be awesome. 710m with led's LED's

Yeah. I don't think I'll even upgrade to the x1400 just because of the price. Might be better to just build a desktop.