I bought my first PC about 7 years ago. I had been using an Amiga, but it was becoming less supported and the interesting stuff was happening elsewhere. So I handed over a large wad of dosh to a company called dotlink who were based a short distance from where I work now in Wembley. This was a Pentium II 350MHz machine with 128MB of memory, a Matrox G200 8MB graphics card, a CD-ROM and an 8GB hard drive. It didn't work when it arrived so I went to their base to get a new motherboard. Back then you got Windows 98 and I used that for some time.

Things moved on and this was upgraded to an AMD Duron 650 and later to a Duron 1200. I gradually replaced everything in that case, including the power supply. I think only the floppy drive is original now. Recently it started playing up and I suspected the power supply was faulty. It was also very noisy. I had long lusted after things like the Shuttle barebones PCs that offered a powerful PC in a quiet, compact form. I couldn't quite stretch to one of those at the moment, so I went for the Antec Aria. This comes without a motherboard, but my Asus fits it nicely. It has space for three hard drives and an optical drive. The front panel has USB, audio and firewire ports and a card reader. I also upgraded to a new NEC dual-layer DVD writer.

This case is nicely designed. The side panels just need a press of a clip and the top panel a single screw. Inside is a drive tray that can be easily removed. Fitting my board involved removing the power supply and attaching lots of wires for the switches, lights and front ports. In all I spent a couple of hours to get it all right.

I am still using my old CPU cooler which is not the quietest, but overall the PC is now a lot quieter than it was. I hardly notice it under the desk apart from the blue lights in the front panel. Most things are working apart from the front Firewire port that needs an adaptor to connect to my card and the card reader seems to need a Linux kernel patch that I may try later.

Pictures can be seen at my Multiply site.