Another good place is www.spotonuk.com

er, for us lesser mortals north of the border, there's.

www.silicon-group.co.uk

or should i say, immortals.

PS: go for a sata HD, if you're thinking of adding a slave drive, they're a lot quicker than IDE's.

It's out of my way too I order online and it usually gets delivered next day

My oh totally agrees with you stormey he builds and strips his pc all the time adding and removing bits here and there ,its about the only time i ever let him near it xdk

this is my mainframe PC, i built it 4 yrs ago, at that time it was at the cutting edge of technology. it's still going great. 32 bit processors were at their limits at the time, so they were prone to overheating, hence the enormous fan and heatsink.



the small black rectangular box on the right is the fan speed controller i spoke about earlier.



this is the graphics card, it's so powerfull it must be connected to the 12v supply. normally they're powered from the AGP slot. notice it's spotless, no dust, i stripped the whole system down this morning to clean the dust off all components. this is most important, i've known of CPU's burning out due to clogged fins on the heat sink.



the finished job. just below the floppy drive there's an adapter for 2 usb's ,and 2 firewire sockets, very handy on the front !



for you technophobes. the spec is.
ASUS mb a7nx.
AMD 3000+ barton chip.
3 GIG ram.
RADEON 9800 pro graphics.
2 x 250 gig hard drives.
16 x dual-layer DVD burner.
16 x DVD reader.
650 watt PSU.
8 x usb sockets.

it's as close as you'll get to a 64 bit system, however, i'll maybe treat myself next year.

Don't motherboard come in different 'sockets' though?

It's easy if you know what goes with what

I wish you would Azz, I'm sick of getting ripped off and paying for things I don't need or aren't compatible with what I've already got as I don't know what I'm doing.

the sockets on MB's are all marked in small print, you might need a magnifying glass to see them though. ide sockets are marked either IDE 1, IDE 2, or IDE 0, IDE 1, you must remember the power of zero in computing. your master HD will be read as HD 0, if you have 2 HD's they will be HD 0, HD 1. tell you what, i'll post a pic so you can all see for yourselves. it's an old MB, but basically they're still the same.

here you go folks.

this is the MB. the yellow socket's for the CPU, the green socket next to the AGP fan is for the graphics card, the green and the white sockets at the bottom are for your IDE cables.



this is the HD, note the jumper connectors, marked MA, SL, CB. the small white bridge connector is what you use to bridge the pins with, either master, or slave, don't use the CB pins.



this is the IDE cable, to connect the HD's to the MB.



easy, innit.

a wee tip, for those who're gonna take the plunge and have a go. all you need is a philips screwdriver, but the small screws are slippy little suckers. get a magnetic screwdriver, if you can't get one, an ordinary screwdriver can be magnetised by stoking the blade along a strong magnet (like the magnets on the back of speakers) draw the blade slowly across the magnet about a dozen times, in the same direction (not back and forth) and you've got a magnetic screwdriver.