Squirm

I'm Paul, 20, living just inside greater London and am currently midway through a study gap year on a CS course. I work as a fulltime barman and will continue to until May when I jet off for a round-the-world trip. So I'm having to save as much as I can, meaning any significant PC mods will need to wait until I go back to uni. Like Ron, I'm from ExVBF so when I'm at the PC this takes up a fair chunk of my time. I'm also an IRC-oholic, I help maintain this forum's IRC server. PC time not spent doing either of these is directed at programming, usually a mix of small simple tools and demos written in VB and larger projects in C++. Time for some specs: AMD Athlon 2100+ 1.73GHz 512Mb ATI Radeon 9000 (IF) Pro 64Mb GFX 76Gb (IBM?) HD Samsung DVD Samsung CD-R/CD-RW Lexmark Z65 printer Windows XP Pro SP1 DELL Axim X5 PDA (Intel XScale PXA255 400MHz, 64Mb RAM, 48Mb ROM) Microsoft PocketPC 4 My take on the whole modification idea is noise. I'm a bit of a noise-freak, having altered or upgraded quite a few of my bits for quieter running. Slow CPU fans with huge heatsink, large slow case fans, drive enclosures, and so forth. The difference is astounding and well worth it. The only noisy bits I have left are the HD which needs replacing and the CD/DVD when they are active. I plan on getting a new quieter case at some point. Well, thats about all. :)