I wasted no time in removing the original 640GB hard drive and replacing it with my own 1.5TB and 1.0TB drives. Additionally I stuff in two video cards, one PCIe and the other PCI. The case is an absolute pain to work with and you need to be careful you don’t slice your finger off on all the exposed edges of bare metal. Fact of the matter is, there’s tons of extra room inside the case for more drives, but the odd design doesn’t allow for more than two. I suppose I could just "stack" them in there and hope they don’t start rattling around.

With the innards completely changed around I powered it back up and installed Windows 7. I admit Win7 did a great job of installing itself. It picked up all the drives and understood there were two video cards and three monitors hooked up. It loaded a basic set drivers and multimon was working without me having to configure anything. I need to actually install updated drivers but I liked how Windows got it right.

Funny thing is, I installed Windows and got several apps installed in less than an hour. You can’t actually get XP installed in an hour so that’s progress!

I didn’t get much done with it, but it’s still running even after I ripped it’s guts out and made all sorts of hardware changes. Tonight will be a frenzy of app installations. I got a few of the smaller apps done and even got Office 2007 on there, but there is still so much to install.

So what did I actually get you ask? An Athlon II X4 630 with 8GB of Ram. I added 2.5TB of drive space and two NVidia graphics cards (an 8500 and a 6200).