It's a pretty innocent and easy mod to start with.  All you need is a PC case with a couple of LEDs in it, some scissors, a soldering iron and new replacement LEDs of your desired color and MCD level.  This, as you might guess, is why I decided to start here in my modding career.  That and LEDs are damned cheep when compared to some of the other mods I'm sure I'll be getting in to.

So here we find some shots of our starting hardware:

First up we have the 5mm ultra-bright blue LED from Radio Shack.  Chiming in at around 2600 MCD, this is a rather bright little uppy that can give you a bit ofa headache if you look at it head-on.  The other key component of this project is my brand new Lian-Li PC-68USB case procured from Bigfoot Computers up in Canada.  This is, without a doubt, the sweetest case I've ever owned.  Brushed aluminum mid-tower case with 4 5.25" external drive bays, 3 3.5" external drive bays and another 4 3.5" drive bases inside.  All this in a freakin' mid-tower.  comes stock with two 80mm Adda fans up front and another one in the rear.  Check out a nice review of the case over at Hardware Extreme should your curiosity be piqued.  Note the amount of green in the photos below...we simply must do something about that.

So now we get to be a bit destructive, enter a pair of scissors and one shaky right hand...hey, you expect me to be calm and sedate the first time I hack something off of a brand new, $200 case?  Yeah, right.

Just a simple matter of attaching the positive and the ground cables to the right sides of the LED, a smidge bit of solder on each end and *poof* a nice, blue power light to replace the dull green that was there just a few minutes ago.  Finish of with some heat-shrink rap to protect from any unsightly shorts....repeat the process for the hard drive LED and remount everything back in the face plate and the case.

That's it.   Simple, unobtrusive, yet oddly satisfying.  You don't realize how dull green and orange are until you've swapped them out with something blue.  It'll match the cold cathode light that's going to get installed in the future very nicely I wager.  Now we just need to do something about the floppy, CD and CDR LEDs....but that's all for another day.