What the internet can do
Besides being the #2 entry on Google for Technical Difficulties, there's a host of other more obscure topics for which I show up on the first page, like kayak xm600 case power. And why would anybody be doing that search? Well, perhaps one of your friends is playing a practical joke on you and has given you the motherboard to a hp kayak xm600 (but not the rest of the machine), and you want to put it in a regular case, but you don't know how to hook up the power and reset switches because unlike your garden variety Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer, HP doesn't want to help you hook up this motherboard to a case they didn't make, they want to sell you their latest high end $6,000 workstation. So you go through the Google results, with no good leads and finally in desperation you decide to email this guy who seems to be able to laugh at himself and who obviously has a HP Kayak, and see if he can help you.

Unlikely you say? Completely made up?

Hi Derek
I wonder if you could help me. I have recently got my hands on a P2190-60001 dual S370 motherboard from a HP Kayak XM 600 series 2, but did not get the case and want to put the motherboard in a standard generic case. My problem is that I cannot find out how to switch it on. It has a front panel block which apparently connects to the front panel lights and switches through a ribbon cable, and the HP documentation is useless when you are talking about the generic power switch, reset, power led and hd led. From you recent article, I gather you have a Kayak and would appreciate it if you could have a quick look and tell me which pins are which function.

Thanks
Peter Thorn
Australia

Not a problem Peter, here you go:

The green/black pair is power and the blue/black is reset. The weird part is that that they use the same pin for ground (as seen in the plug picture). The yellow/black runs the disk activity and the green/red/black runs the dual-color power LED.

That's what makes the internet what it is. a sense of comraderie with complete strangers that means I'm willing to spend an hour pulling apart my computer, downloading the manual for my new digital camera and playing with its Macro features, all to help some poor guy in australia get a five year old motherboard running in a generic case.

  ¶ 9:00 PM