1. Test your chosen paints on some portion of the case that is easily stripped and repainted before painting the whole case. I didn't and had numerous problems changing my color choice from red to blue.

2. Stick to one brand of spraypaint. Many times, if you spray a new brand over top of the old, you will discover they are incompatible. The paint does wonky things and makes a mess. This is hard to recover from. See #1 about the importance of testing paint.

3. Measure and check everything twice before cutting metal. Hold the fan up where its going to go. Do it for each location on the case individually. It had escaped my notice that the front fan location was a different size than the rear. I ordered 3 identical fans and one was wrong.

4. Research a lot of articles on the web. Someone has done it before, and they can help you to do it better. Also, look for articles to corroborate each other. If you have only one guy's opinion, don't place too much stock in it. It's free advice and you get what you pay for.

5. Prep is the most important part of the job. Mask thoroughly and carefully. Assume overspray will go on everything that isn't explicitly protected even if you didn't paint anywhere close to it. Clean thoroughly before painting. Don't leave finger oil everywhere. Completely disassemble the case, removing every possible part so you can paint them individually.

6. Make sure you are done cutting and grinding on the case before you paint it. Vacuum the area and put down a fresh drop cloth (they're cheap insurance). Wait a day for dust to settle. Industrial painting is done in a cleanroom environment. See how close you can get to that ideal.

7. Come up with a cooling strategy. Think carefully about where to put fans, not just from a cosmetic standpoint, but from the standpoint of optimum cooling. See my notes on the Specs Page about how to do this.

The first color I tried from the first paint manufacturer...

1. Use a price search engine like www.pricewatch.com to find out what the best prices are.

2. Besides price, try also to check out the retailler's reputation to make sure they are reliable. I used www.resellerratings.com.

3. Think about what order you need the parts in. Focus on getting the parts needed to do the case first. For example, the case itself, fans, windows, lighting, and so forth. You will also need to get your motherboard so you can plan for its placement. Delay the rest of the parts as much as possible. They may very well come down in price while you are finishing your case.

4. You can save with mail order. I tried checking local stores for some things. Living in the Silicon Valley area, there were actually some stores that had mail-order competitive prices, but not very many. Fry's had terrible prices. You'd be amazed at the spread in prices on these computer parts.

5. Read the reviews on the parts. The Internet has a wealth of free information available. Know what you are getting into before you get into it. Don't be satisfied with a single review either, read several. If you can't find reviews for the part you want, leave it alone unless you savor being on the "bleeding edge".

6. Order from as few vendors as possible. The problem, otherwise, is that shipping charges will eat you alive. I used 11 different vendors, and this was way too many! Try for less than half a dozen at most. You'll find that adding a vendor to save $10 doesn't get you ahead.

1. RTFM's. Read the manuals that come with your parts. Read them before you try to put them together. I know you hate to do this. I hate to do this. But there are little nuggets in there that you must know to make things work right. They are things you will not guess. They are often idiosyncracies of a particular part that are the opposite of what another part likes. I'm sorry, its a dirty job, but somebody has to do it!

2. Keep it simple at first. Install the minimum number of components needed to make the thing work, get it working, then go back and add the other stuff. For me, that means mobo with ram and cpu, raid controller with two drives, video card, and cd-rw drive. When all of that is working properly and I can boot into windows, I will add my sound card and extra usb ports. Ideally, I should be bringing up a single hard drive instead of RAID, but what the Hell? If it doesn't work, I may back off to a single drive to get up and then go back to RAID.