Another new computer

My colleague Ian has just got a new desktop PC and was going to drop his old one in a skip before realising that I might like the bits. He wasn't sure about all the figures, with it having sat dormant since he got his Sony Vaio laptop, so the first thing to do was to check what I had.

What we have here is a 1GHz PIII with 256Mb of RAM, 120Gb hard drive, DVD ROM, three Firewire ports, four USB ports (two are USB 2.0), an insanely good soundcard with the Creative Live Drive visible to bring more inputs and outputs to the front (including optical input - ideal for ripping overly copy-protected CDs) and an nVidia GeForce 4 (not sure how much memory). Bloody ace for a freebie. The grey box on top is my little toolbox, which was the best £4 I've spent in Woolworths EVER.

I'm going to make it much quieter, because it's way too loud at the moment. The graphics card is responsible for 80% of the noise, so that'll be first to get attention with one of these, followed by the hard drive (Matrox drives are much louder than the Seagate Baracuda that I'm a fan of) - probably going to go for one of these and lose the Live Drive until I can get a flasher case. The CPU is cooled by a duct over the heatsink and a fairly quiet fan drawing air across it, which will do for the time being but will probably get replaced with something like this or like this depending on my mood and what sort of case I end up with. The PSU seems to be very quiet indeed, but I might just baffle and dampen it a bit more to be on the safe side.

Why all this quietness? Well, I'm going to replace my existing server, Kryten, with this machine. I realised a while back that to call Kryten a server was a complete misnomer because I use it as a desktop machine virtually all the time, certainly more than I do for normal serving, and that the little machine was utterly underpowered for what I wanted to do with it. This is a far more suitable machine, but again it's going to be left on continuously in the corner of my living room, so I don't want it to sound like a jet.

Ian also gave me his old 19" Trinitron CRT monitor (29kg or so) seeing as he's got a 17" LCD (3kg or so) to replace it. Sod the weight though, the picture is awesome... not that the camera on my phone can show it!

On top of this, he gave me a bag of 'odds and sods', which include a USB CDRW drive, a USB2.0 hub, an ADSL router (same as mine, but without the 4-port switch) and an old 10Base-T hub (the only thing likely to be scrapped). Great day for blagging!