Building a PC

I've never assembled a custom PC before. Never had a need to, cared, knew enough, or had enough money. Now that all those criteria are met, the time has come.

I recently bought a neat little machine to be my home fileserver. There's one problem, and it's pretty minor: it's not quite as quiet as I'd hoped, because its CPU runs fast enough to need a fan.

The machine that's served schmonz.com for the past several years is low on disk space, a bit underpowered, and fairly ugly. I'm going to take the case and motherboard from my home fileserver, then add some goodies:

• 1 Kingston Low-Profile 512MB ECC DIMM ($107; lifetime warranty)
• 2 Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM ATA/100 drives ($75 each after rebates; three-year warranty)
• 1 Intel Pro/1000 Ethernet card ($43)

Then, to revivify my home fileserver, I'll put its disks in a machine with the RAM from before, plus:

• 1 VIA EPIA ME6000 motherboard with fanless 600MHz C3 CPU ($140)
• 1 Casetronic CheckerCube-2215 Silver case ($93)
• 1 Mitsumi 7-in-1 USB internal card reader and floppy drive ($27)

The Pug brought my attention to Mini-ITX motherboards. I'm not a junkie, but I think they're pretty neat, and some people have done some clever projects with them.