Well, my stuff arrived today so this evening was dedicated to hardware upgrades. The new Thermaltake chassis is indeed very nice, and surprisingly light. As befitted the occasion, I ensured that I still managed to cut myself and thus christened the case with a bit of the old personal claret - not a fault of the case, I might add, actually a particularly sharp section of the motherboard blanking plate. After some swearing (whilst they may have invented ‘zero insertion force’ CPU sockets some years back, they still haven’t managed to resolve the 1500 pounds of pressure required immediately afterward to mount the heatsink) I managed to get the new bits in and working. I had a small issue whereby the new SATA controller refuses to acknowledge one of my partitions as having data on it, so it appears to be ‘bye bye’ to 100Gb of data - luckily it was my games drive which is the one I’m least worried about losing - just means I have to restart Call of Duty 2 sometime, not that I’ve had much time to play it lately anyway. Oh, and one of the fans in the case seems to not start up sometimes unless you give it a flick, I’m hoping that goes away with more use.
Tomorrow is going to be spent reinstalling software - I’ve got XP, Thunderbird and Firefox and that’s pretty much it at the moment. I’ve decided not to reinstall VC6 or VC7.0 - support from me for those ends as of now.
The other thing to mention is that I also bought a new monitor for my wife at the same time, a 19 inch Samsung with a tasty 4ms response time. It’s very nice indeed, I may consider one myself sometime in the future.