Thanks Jo.

New computer for me, but it's my daughter's old one so no warranty left on that. How did you build the case to do that? Do you mean a tower?

I have a tower but I need to get the drive out of that and was just going to buy a $30 case that fits just the hard drive and that just would plug into laptop via usb.

I need to copy some of my files and a couple of programmes across that I haven't got on this setup but because I'm on a pre-paid wireless set up it costs me heaps per megabyte to download programmes off the net.

Otherwise this computer now is working great. I believe that 'easy ide' I mentioned allows me to choose what I want and then I'll wipe it clean and use for portable storage. The case I mean is not the tower, it's only as large as the actual hard drive itself.