Thanks, Clive. I'll bear that in mind when April 2010 rolls around. And thank you Sandra, for inspiring me to pursue a scheme which was clearly bonkers in the first place.
Meanwhile... I'm astonished and delighted to say that the transplant was a success! Mind you, for a short while it looked like I might have to send this from my laptop.
As it turned out, Plan B was the one that worked. If you've been paying attention, you'll know that my original intention was to simply swap the drives and cards from the old machine into the new one. However, once I set to work, I realised that the two cases (which were pretty much identical in appearance on the outside and had roughly the same MoBo) were vastly different internally.
This led to all sorts of problems, not the least of which being a lack of angled SATA leads - not easy to get hold of at 8:30pm on Good Friday - using flat leads meant I couldn't close the case. Then there was the matter of the side panel being vented differently, because of the way they had aligned the different MoBos leaving no space for a FDD. There was a ton of silly little annoyances like that. In the end, what I did was strip down both machines and swap the MoBos complete with RAM and CPUs, so I'm now using the original case still, but with new MoBo, CPU, RAM and SATA DVD-RW. Being able to lay my hands on a five-year-old tube of Arctic Silver paste was a real a bonus too.
After shuffling the MoBos, CPU coolers and funnels, it was just a simple matter of inserting and connecting all the bits again, before marvelling at the blue screen of death a couple of times until 'Repair Windows' on my Windows 7 install disk finally pulled everything together. Oh yes... and I had re-activate/re-register Windows again, after receiving a not-so-friendly greeting from Microsoft while typing this.
The new/old box containing the leftover bits still needs sorting out and upgrading with a graphics card that came with the original machine, so I may end up coming back with my tail between my legs - particularly if I can't reactivate the original copy of Vista that I upgraded from. But my real question is this...
Am I becoming Bat69?
MSI MS-7366 MoBo
Intel Q8300 CPU
4GB DDR2 RAM
2x1TB WD Caviar Black HD
2x1TB WD Green HD in (external) Icy Box
1TB Seagate HD
500MB Maxtor external HD
3.5TB external storage
Gigabyte Nvidia GTS 250 graphics
HP w2207h display
Creative X-Fi Elite sound
Yamaha MS202 Monitor speakers
Epson V300 scanner
HP 970cxi printer
APC SmartUps 700 UPS
Partridge/Pear tree
