jawtheshark's Journal: Why you want me as a brother.

The JawPaq is dying: it hangs randomly according to my sister. I first thought it was overheating or something, but that's not possible according to my sister since the temperature in her room has remained about the same the last year. So my second guess is flaky RAM. I already had trouble enough finding RAM for that machine, so I'm not going to bother with that anymore.

So what to do? She doesn't really need a computer. Last week I started looking around what I could get for a minimal investment and give her a fully new computer. I found really nothing under 700Euro that was "doable". Most machines with 256Meg RAM. My minimum allowed is 512Meg these days.
Well today, pushing my luck, I went to a local little assembly shop and looked around for bargains. Seems that mother fortuna is on my side lately: they had a combo Athlon XP 2600+ with 512DDR RAM and a motherboard for 249Euro! Yay! Then I started looking around for other pieces, and by the time I was done my limit was not reached. Well unless I let them assemble it. For 495Euro I got:

• AMD Athlon XP 2600+
• Motherboard (ASRock K7S8X, never heard of that brand) It has integrated Audio, 10/100Mbps and 4 USB 2.0 slots...
• 512 Meg 2700DDR on one stick
• A really nice looking case with 300W powersupply
• Maxtor 80GB disk 7200RPM
• CD-RW/DVD combo
• 1.44 Floppy (I could have taken one I had in stock, I know)
• GeForce MX 440

Yeah, frontside bus is only 333MHz (hey, the Dual has a frontside bus of only 233Mhz). It isn't really top of the line, but I think that this is quite a nice machine for the price I paid. Heck, if I had another 500Euro spare I'd buy one for my brother. Perhaps Bill Gates really was right that sooner or later hardware will cost nearly nothing anymore. I remember the times where 500Euro would buy you 2 sticks of 1Meg RAM.

Oh, and for the record: this is the first time I actually assembled a complete PC myself, including sticking the CPU in the socket and mounting the heatsink. From new parts that is, straight out of the box.

Yeah, I spoil my little sister... sue me ;-)

Re:Finally..

[jawtheshark]

Yeah, just laugh. I've assembled PC's before, only I never installed the CPU. I am scared of doing that since the day I put an old 486 in the wrong direction into the socket and the magic smoke escaped. So I did everything you can do with a PC, except installing a (new) CPU. Oh, I've exchanged CPU's from one PC to another...

Alas, I was a small kid when you bought kits to assemble yourself. I'm from the C64 generation... you got the machine as-is. (I never owned a C64 in those times, I now have one of