I always wanted an aluminium case. A friend gave me this Pentium II he finally decided to get rid of last year. Nice PC, but even nicer in black and with newer hardware in it.
I suck at spray painting and I need to get better paint next time. But if the light comes from the right angle it looks like I imagined it.
I replaced the key lock with a large screw, got rid of the drive cages, replaced the PSU and mainboard, added a graphics card with internally pluggable VGA, replaced the external VGA port with a serial port and added a small LCD panel where the drives used to be, connected internally to the unplugged VGA port. Oh, and green LED strips. I also added two 60 mm fans in the back. I didn't want to cut a whole in any of the other sides, so 60 mm was the largest possible size. Still better than none.
And yes, I actually have a use for a RS232 port.
The main reason I put in the LCD is because I can. I liked the idea ever since I saw a build with a two-line character LCD for status messages around 2004. But nowadays there is a lot more space on the front since optical drives and diskette drives have become rare. So why not make it a regular screen that can be addressed by the OS without much custom code? The idea is to have it display CPU load, temps, notifications and stuff. But I may end up using it mainly for art, animations. I'm not sure, yet.