My projects had been wallowing in neglect the past few months. The elite machine had been in desperate need of a hardware and cosmetic upgrade, and the Dragon was partially disassembled, gathering dust on a shelf. After recently overhauling my room and work area, I realized I couldn't afford to have my mods sitting around serving no useful purpose other than holding down carpet. I started with the elite machine. The hardware upgrade included a new Super Socket 7 baby AT mobo, and this necessitated the fabrication of a new motherboard tray. I reworked the cables; even taking the time to disassemble the power supply and neatly wrap the power cables. I re-routed the rope light and now the side panel emits a nice glow once again. The dragon was a bit trickier. After a few years of recording audio at live events, a layer of dust and fog-machine film had coated the system inside and out. I stripped the machine down to the chassis and gave all the components a good cleaning. The years of smoke and dust had really done a number on the wood elements as well, so I gave all those components a fresh coat of oil finish to restore their luster. I straightened out the rat's nest of power cables and reconnected the long-missing CCFL. I upgraded the CPU last summer and this required a heat sink upgrade, but I hadn't had the time to integrate the new cooling fan into the case. With the modifications for that out of the way, I added high-brightness LEDs behind the dragon scrollwork on the CD-RW; I think that update made the biggest visual impact of the cosmetic upgrades. Just before I undertook the upgrade process, I had posted old photos of the cases to drum up a little traffic for the site at hardforum.com, [H]ardOCP's community website. I was using the thread to track my work on the cases, and a few days after posting the original Dragon photos I received a PM from the editor of the largest PC magazine in China: hello! I am the Chinese editor working for the biggest PC hard ware magazine (www.microcomputer.com) and i want to print your DRAGON case on our mag. I need u supply the full-size pics and 1000words my ICQ:3*******0 my MSN: *******@163.com my E-mail: ****@cniti.com best wishes! looking forward your reply! At first I was understandably skeptical, after all, I'm just some dude in the middle of Iowa, but it turned out to be on the level and I'm pretty excited about the prospect of having my work in a widely read publication. I consider it to be a pretty big honor as it puts my work in the same league as the cats from bit-tech.net, and they are "teh a wesome".