If you are in the market for a new chassis, you could do worse than to pick up the Antec Sonata. It comes with a 380-watt power supply, and boasts some of the smartest interior design around. The whole case is meant to be generally quieter and easier to work with, and it does so splendidly.

So I took my gaming computer apart today, and put it into the new case. The old case can’t accept power supply upgrades (stupid proprietary thinking, anyway), so in order to power my two hard drives, a Pentium 4 and my GeForce 6600, I had to upgrade. I took advantage of the opportunity to trade out the slow, stubborn old DVD-ROM for a regular CD-ROM drive, and upgraded from the Soundblaster Live to a Soundblaster Live 5.1. (It’s a subtle improvement, sure, but since I had the case open anyway…)

The good news is, it all worked the first time I powered it up. That alone is almost newsworthy all by itself, as it’s unusual enough to nearly be unique in my experience.

I also may have gotten to the bottom of the trouble playing City of Heroes. Even with the new power supply, I still had the weird game crash problem… but once I turned off the antialiasing, I was able to play for two solid hours without a glitch. I’m hesitant to claim victory just yet, but it’s at least a promising start.

Now I just need to clean up this mess I created during the chassis transfer… oops…