I decided I would build my mother a computer to replace her aging Dell

The new computer does use a lot of older parts, but they are light years better than her old Dell. This is the SSD boot drive, and it really carries the system, with the old Q9550 and slow DDR2 this system would be incredibly sluggish with windows 10 if I used a mechanical hard drive, this SSD really saves it.

Plus the SSD mounting point allows me to use it to hide my mediocre cable management

her old computer: Dell Inspirion 630 tower
- Pentium 4 HT 2.2 ghz
- 2 gigs of DDR2 667
- 160 Gb HDD
- ATI 1800 XT
- CD-ROM drive (NOT a DVD drive!)
- DELL 1280 x 1024 CRT monitor
- dell mouse and dell keyboard (Both are PS/2)
- DELL speakers (left is broken)
- Logitec webcam 480p @ 15 fps
- Windows XP

since I didn't actually have to try that hard to make something better, I decided to go for looks first, performance second so I could blow my mom's mind

new computer:
- Intel Executive Platform motherboard, socket LGA 775 DQ35JOE
- Q9550 quad core 2.83 ghz
- 8 gigs of DDR2 800
- 60 Gig SSD (configured as boot drive only)
- twin 1 Tb western digital "Blue" hard drives in RAID 1 (my mother has a history of failed hard drives)
- Viotek 450 watt PSU
- AGPtek RGB mouse
- M200 RGB keyboard
- PC cooler "Shark" heatsink (using Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound)
- external DVD burner
- DIYPC DIY-F2-P mini tower
- RX 460 graphics card (not pictured)
- evercool HDD cooler
- Microsoft LifeCam 720p webcam (not pictured)
- two UV strips (generic brand)
- APC BACK-UPS 900 (they have dirty power)
- Dell "ultrasharp" monitor with built in USB hub
- Rosewill 300 mbps wifi card (PCIe x1)
- adaptek firewire card (mom has older accessories she occasionally uses)
- Windows 10