Scorched Earth

Foreword by Wil Harris

We always try to keep things satisfingly different here at bit-tech, and this latest mod from our team is no exception. A couple of months ago, British laptop maker Rock got in touch with me to see if we would be interested in modding up one of the firm's laptops as a showpiece. Obviously, the answer was a resounding 'Where's my Dremel?!' and the modding began.

Who better to work on a spooky, Halloween-themed mod than our granddaddy of modding, Dave 'macroman' Williams? Fresh from piecing together the Creative X-Fi Gaming Mod, he was raring to go once again.

We've also teamed up with Rock to give one lucky reader the chance to win Dave's work, keep on reading to find out how you can enter and walk away with this rather unique laptop.

Scorched Earth by Dave Williams

Once again it’s Halloween and it's time for ‘trick or treat’. This year’s treat is Rock's award-winning Extreme 64 power notebook, modded straight to hell. Say hello to project ‘Scorched Earth’.

Take one very new, very shiny Extreme 64 dual processor powerhouse notebook and what is the first thing that goes through your mind? “Quick, rip it apart and get the thing modded” of course. (Well some of us anyway).


And what a beast it is. Weighing in at a whopping 5.8kg this, at the time of writing is one of the fastest notebooks on the planet! Because we wanted to leave the beast functional, we decided just to mod the lid - leaving all the ports and paraphenalia accessible.

This is just as well, since the final mod adds almost another 1kg of weight to this already heavy machine - it's not exactly the most portable notebook in the world!

Disassembly

The first step is to disassemble and remove the lid. Disassembly is fairly straight forward, mainly consisting of finding and removing the correct screws, the first of which are hidden underneath little rubber pads.


The unscrewing continued until the lid and screen were completely separated.


With the machine thus prepared it is time to take it into macro’s scary beauty parlour…