All right, so after a few days, my new toys arrived in the mail.

The first thing I noticed after unpacking everything was that the case I mentioned above was bigger than I expected. It turns out that Micro-ATX, while still smaller than a standard tower PC, is still a bit bulkier than something you'd expect to see sitting next to a TV, like a DVD player or game system. (EXCEPT MAYBE FOR XBOX LOL.) Oh well.

I started putting things together. This can be accomplished with a standard Phillips screwdriver. (You don't want to use a power drill; aside from tightening things too tightly and risking cracking expensive hardware, it also can throw around a lot of magnetic and statoelectric voodoo that can spell trouble for computers.) In earlier case designs, it was fairly easy to misconnect things with potentially fatal results (to your computer, anyway, not so much to you), but with modern ATX design standards, it's rather hard to do unless you're really trying; cables will either be shaped in a manner that it's impossible to connect them incorrectly, or, if it is possible, they'll be clearly labelled. The instruction manual was quite helpful with this process, though the instructions were in kind of a random order.

The processor was interesting. The actual Pentium chip is this little flat tiny box, somewhere between a saltine and a postage stamp in size. But in the box with the chip is this huge, heavy metallic thing that looks like debris from the crash at Rockwell. This is the processor's heat sink and fan, which dissipate the huge amount of heat the processor generates. It's hard to believe that such a little tiny chip can generate so much heat that it requires this thing that looks like it'd be at home in a nuclear physics lab to cool it down.

Anyway, so I put everything together in the box, closed it up, took a deep breath, and pressed the button on the front of the case. And... nothing. Hmm. I then realized there was a master switch on the back of the case that needed to be turned on first, so I flicked that on and pushed the button on the front again. Again... nothing. Hmm.

After puzzling over this for about twenty minutes, I finally started disconnecting and reconnecting cables. Apparently the cable which connected the case's power button to the motherboard was loose, because after reconnecting that cable and trying again, the fans started whirring up, the monitor flickered, and my system came to life!