PCGuy, that's because ATX power supplies don't power up unless their main power connector is connected to the motherboard, or you trick it into thinking it is by shorting the green wire to a black wire.

I'm upgrading to a new system effectively, I'm looking at: Mobile XP2500+ (probably with a SP-97 HSF) 1GB KHX3200 (2X512MB) DFI Lanparty B Radeon 9800Pro /w VGA Silencer 16X DVD-ROM 8X DVD-RW 80GB Seagate Barracuda. Now I would have gone for a samsung spinpoint, but I couldn't find any quickly and I...

Cool.

Maybe there's a huge fan behind that side mesh?

Is there any noticable difference between the parallel ATA and serial ATA Seagate 80GB drives? (apart from the difference in cache)