I've been meaning to set up a PC for the kids to use for on-line and CD games. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that some of the old games don't work on Windows 2000, the other is that I might want to use the PC at the same time.

I've got an old Celeron 433 PC that used to be in Dad's office. I had already upgraded it with my old Matrox video card, Yamaha sound card, more memory and a second hard drive, but had a problem fitting a CD. The case requires the drive to have plastic rails fitted and I couldn't find any that fitted. So I splashed out on a £10 case from ebuyer. It's not too bad actually, apart from having too many screws to undo. We have some old Gatemay machines at work that don't require a screwdriver to open the case and replace a drive. I guess something like that would cost a lot more. Over the last couple of evenings I've moved all the parts over and it all seems to work. I added a third drive in a removable caddy for backup and file transfer. Those three drives add up to less than 10GB. Not much by modern standards, but enough for what it will be used for.

Next stage is to do a clean install of Windows 98 along with some firewall and anti-virus software. I intend to use Firefox as the browser for extra safety. It seems to do all we need.

Of course the PC will also be running the grid.org client to give me a few extra points, but it's going to take a while to process each work unit.

I know a lot of people think they need the latest/greatest PC, but unless you play new games it's over the top. Anything over 300MHz will be fine for internet, word processing etc as long as it has enough memory. 256MB should be a minimum. You can pick up old PCs at computer fairs for less than £50. Much better for the environment to re-use old hardware than to keep producing new stuff. Just keep back-ups in case the disk fails. If anyone has old hard drives that they have outgrown I might be interested.