Always use an anti-static wrist strap (left of picture) and keep everything diconnected from the mains power! :o)
Components: some old, some new, some borrowed...
My old machine had: MSI mobo, Athlon 700 'Thunderbird' CPU, 256MB PC100 SDRAM, Geforce3Ti200, SB Live card (I forget which version, nothing spectacular), Pioneer DVD, Teac CD-RW, some standard ATX case.
Of these, I'll transplant the graphics card, probably the sound card, the CD-R and DVD into the new machine, and move an old CD drive back to make it useable. An old floppy + CD drive was donated by a friend. Will keep my old Cambridge Soundworks speaker set, its still great. The rest will be new.
Kobian '115' ATX case (www.kobian.com). I got this because it was on offer at Maplin. Power rating is 300W ('Mercury' PSU), its approved for Intel Pentium (for what its worth), and looked OK for what I needed. After some subsequent reading around it turns out to be a fairly well respected company. I'd recommend researching cases a bit more than I did, i.e. not just the power rating, cos you don't want to be lumbered with a poorly designed/built case. It isnt one of the screwless variety, but aside from that quibble I was pleased with it. Features of note: comes with rear case fan, has a couple of front USB ports under a nice blue flap, not unattractive. Lacks any easily removable drive bay cages, but no big deal to me. Comes with a reasonable bag of bits plus a mains power cable, but could've done with some extra cable ties (came with just 1).
ECS (EliteGroup) K7S5A (v3.1) Socket A. Northbridge chipset is SiS735. Since I'm not building the ultimate PC here, I went for a cheap Socket A motherboard/CPU bundle. However, I did read around a lot about the pros and cons of most recent (and not so recent) motherboards: theres a lot of info out there on the web/newsgroups.
Were it not for the bundle price I might have gone for a better board (e.g. with USB2, and faster bus. I was looking at VIA KT333-based boards) but the bundle had the exact CPU I wanted and seemed a bargain. If my screwdriver slips it wont break the bank...
Although ECS are arguably not up there with Gigabyte, MSI et al, this and other recent boards are usually good value, tidy, stable boards with decent features, plus easy to install. Moreover, there seems to be huge support and user-base for the K7S5A (see newsgroup link below) and in its day it got good reviews. Features of note: AMI Bios, 133Mhz FSB, UltraATA 100 IDE (NB no ATA133 support, but I didnt care), 5 PCI, AGP4X, support for older SDRAM but leaves just 2 slots for DDR, on-board AC97 sound, optional 10/100 LAN, USB1 (2 ports + 2 more if you wire them up). The motherboard comes with 1 floppy cable + 1 IDE cable, but I wish they threw in an extra IDE cable, and a longer one at that.
Hence, its not really a future-proof board, and doesn't offer much for tweakers/overclockers, but is perfectly satisfactory for my machine.
K7S5A v3 product page at ECS site
ECS US website
ECS home (Taiwan)
ECS SocketA motherboard product range
Newsgroup: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.elitegroup (link via Google )
Some user opinions on DooYoo.com
Firing Squad review
Hardcore Ware review
OCWorkBench review
Planet Savage review
Toms Hardware SiS735 motherboard review
Some more user comments
Athon XP2000+, 'Processor-in-a-Box' variety, which includes the approved fan.
The motherboard bundle did not offer anything except an XP2000, but anyway I would've gone for that chip.
There seems little reason to be at the cutting-edge in terms of CPU speed these days, but I avoided the very low end Athlon XPs which arent much cheaper than the XP2000.
Note, FSB speed of the motherboard might limit compatibility with future Athlons XPs, but I read that its ok with the 133/266 variety of Athon 2600XP (?).
Top Tip: see AMD site movies and PDFs which offer very handy guides to fitting the CPU and heatsink/fan.
A no-brainer really: one 256MB stick of PC2100 DDR. The ECS board does have 'legacy' PC100 SDRAM slots but I didnt want to immediatly handicap the new machine with my slower RAM. On the other hand (not such a no-brainer?!) maybe WindowsXP would benefit from 512MB ram of any speed.
64MB Geforce3 Ti200 64MB from my other machine, made by Inno3d, got quite cheap from Dabs.com a while ago).
Still a quite nice card! On a par with the recent Geforce4 cards (except the Ti varieties of course), and oddly better DirectX8.1 and other features compared to the low-end Geforce4s.
I think the GF3Ti still has some life in it, it runs most stuff very fast even on the old machine -- my guess is I upgrade to GF4Ti after GF5/fx arrives.
e.g. see Toms Hardware benchmarks
and Anandtech UT2003 benchmarks
and another GF3Ti200 vs GF4 vs GF2 page.
UPDATE! (Jan 2004) Upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB (Sapphire)! Its a very good mid-range card, with full DirectX 9 etc. Heres an article, and another. New card gives benchmarks of: 3dmark2001=9687, 3dmark03=3619, Aquamark3=25623, which I think are about right considering rest of the system. Old card gave 3dmark03 score of around 850 -- Ha Ha!
Western Digital 60GB 7200rpm. Was never really sure how much my old 5400rpm HD slowed things down, so given the now almost-zero price difference between the two speeds, seemed a no-brainer to go for the faster one. Similarly, the price gap between 40GB and 60GB seems about 5 quid, so whats the point?! BTW, I got the drive from PC World component centre, which although not the most fashionable place to buy PC gear it was exactly the same price as some of the so-called cheap online shops. Dabs isnt always the best price for *everything*.
Waiting to hear quality of onboard AC97 (I read its adequate but not great), but prepared to swap for my trusty Soundblaster Live.
Diamond SupraST internal PCI (winmodem) salvaged from old machine. This never seemed to quite agree with Win98SE (occassional lockups) so I hope it would get on better with XP. TODO: stop messing around and get a modem that linux can see!
Update:Yes, lockups fixed in XP. No idea why, maybe mobo/IRQ oddity, nothing to do with OS?
Update: see ADSL networking page. Now using broadband router/hub.
Better the devil you know: we go with WindowsXP, plus a Win98se partition just in case. Linux: Redhat 7.3. Plenty of room for other linux partitions for experimentation, e.g. a gcc3.x distrib, and maybe Slackware.
Most pictures were taken using a SiPix 'Snap' miniture digital camera. The camera is very cheap, absolutely tiny, and OK for a laugh. Can only do 640x480, 8MB fixed memory. But despite the good comments you might read it doesnt really perform well in less-than-perfect light, plus the battery life isnt great. Also, due to the small lens/viewer its hard to centre images. It can do short movie clips and act as a webcam, and comes with some decent enough software, but personally I'd recommend spending a bit more and getting a better one.