Finally, the new external hard drive caddy arrived - its a sata connection, which makes it vastly fast compared to the old USB case. Its just like writing to an internal hard drive - almost no difference to the speed.

The case connects to the motherboard through a small hole on one of the expansion slot covers. Its just a wire, plugged into the motherboard, like a normal internal sata drive. Unsure whether I can just turn on the external case half way through using the pc though.

Anyway, I decided to put Windows and Linux on. I have one hard drive for both operating system files, and a second hard drive entirely for documents. This drive is shared between both os'es.

Windows is being a real pain with the LAN card. Its always saying "A network cable is unplugged", despite the wire sitting nicely in the socket. The drivers are installed as normal. Yet it just wont work. However, Linux works perfectly with the card. The LAN card is a Marvell Yukon Gigabit LAN card built into the motherboard (Asus A8V Deluxe AI Series).

Well, i'll get it working eventually. The worst case scenario would be squeezing a network card into a pci slot, which there's now a short supply of.