SJ Cuthbertson

Wireless keyboards and mice really become worth their money when you spill two-thirds of a pint of water over your desk. Unless your name is Fish, of course, but in my case, I was able to lob them out of the way onto my bed, and spend my time worrying instead about creating a levee out of kleenex and scrap paper to save my speakers and the box itself. In retrospect, grabbing my towel would have been simpler, but resulted in more laundry.

The box was recently upgraded from 512Mb to 1.5Gb of RAM, so it is now officially sweet. I.e. it actually COPES with having Firefox, OpenOffice and Foobar open, and now takes less than 30s to start up or shut down. Part of the motivation for upgrading (apart from just getting bored waiting for it to do stuff) was that I’ve decided I’ll probably sell it and get a laptop after exams. I spent around £1000 on the parts when I built it, in about 2003/04, and although the graphics card now seems laughably outdated, the general specs are still not to be sniffed at. It’s also quite light and looks good. A laptop is going to be a lot more use for me in the near future – my computing needs have changed an awful lot since VI form!

Do please get in touch if you might have a use for an ATX tower in black aluminium, with 2.16Ghz Athlon XP 3000+, 1.5Gb RAM, Radeon 9600XT (AGP, DVI- and VGA-out), onboard 5.1 surround sound and dual gigabit ethernet, fast DVD-writer and CD-writer IDE drives, optional digital-terrestrial PCI TV/capture card, 120Gb IDE h/d, SATA/RAID capable, firewire and more USB 2.0 ports than you can shake a stick at, efficient cooling, screwdriver-less upgrading, and front-panel access to USB/firewire/headphone/line-in. Comes with Labtec wireless keyboard and mouse, black, with media/internet buttons and a mouse-recharging station, and a ViewSonic VG712b (black) 17″ TFT DVI-/VGA-in monitor, no dead pixels and durable enough to survive a working tour of Europe unscathed. Available from early June.