Building a performance PC for your dear Family Members:

PART ONE

Yeah so guess what , I got drag into this by my dear mother.
She and her husband (my step father) finally decided to upgrade their 7 year old main pc which was a
Pentium 166 with Edo ram and 4 x 500meg Scasi drives to a new power pc for no money what so ever!
So the recruited me the loyal son and aspiring computer geek to deliver the goods .
Gotta admit I was happy in building them a system 'cause beeing cash strapped I new how to mark up a little without them noticing and automatically would be able to
pay my rent the next week.
The Budged was AUS$820 with which I bought a great ABIT KD7 motherboard ( of course you realize by now that this is my favorite mobo maker, I myself own a MAX2)
used my spare AMD Athlon XP 2000 CPU (which I didn't really wanted to part with , cause I went through a lot of effort and patients to unlock it a while ago and am still fondly remembering my ecstatic over clocking experiences)also used my spare 40gig IBM and 300w PSU, so just needed to go and buy an extra 512 stick
of DDR333 memory and a heatsink. With all that equipped I caught a train down to Helensburgh , which is one hour outside of Sydney .
I knew Its gonna take me at least a few hours to build and then fine tune the machine , so I was automatically prepared to bite the bullet and stay over night and anyway I haven’t had a home cooked meal for a long while .
So after I arrived Erika ( my mother ) made me a cup of coffee which lack in quality and taste but was bearable ‘cause of the good will and motherly instinct which it represented, and had a little chat with Frank ( her husband ) about whatever. You gotta be careful keeping the conversation aloof with him ‘cause otherwise he’ll drag you into a righteous debate about nothing. Anyway wanted to get stuck into it and moved into their office to dismantle the old PC, ‘cause still needed to use the old Scasi drives the CDR , CD and floppy and of course the case .

A full Tower case …. Hmmmm. And there the nightmare started . This old case used the old connectors and the back plate wasn’t usable at all with a new motherboard! Damn….Anyway I mentioned that we at least need a new case and keyboard to make the whole thing work but …. Frank had a ‘better Idea’ and decided to used his welding expertise to adjust the back plate of that antique case , he cut into it with and angle grinder and opened up a hole so all the ports of the ABIT mobo will be accessible .
I guess he always wanted to be a HACKER !? Anyway, that took us all but three hours until I was ready to really get into the installation of the hardware. So of I went and unpack that beautiful mobo with the sexy north bridge fan and the USB 2 connectors and fire wire and quality workman ship.

Hehe, my trusted AthlonXP2000 just wanted to slide onto this mobo and after manhandling the new Coolermaster heat sink, it surrendered to my will as well . The TNT Riva card I got , needed a lot of pressure to fit into the tight AGP slot and the 512 DDR stick didn’t have a problem in adding into the whole picture.
With my usual first excitement in putting a new system together I ignored totally the annoying hovering presence of Frank who was ever so eager to involve me in his idea of techno talk , although after a while he must have realized he was talking crap or might I have projected that over ?
Anyway I installed all this into the massacred Tower case and connected the the 40 gig hard drive, connected all the necessary Power cables and was ready for the first boot !

And YES my baby booted up like a Dream, went straight into the bios to change the boot sequence to first boot CD and started to install Windows XP Pro.

Ah , time for dinner break while windows was installing. Yes and the food was ok, honest home cooking is always satisfying, although I gotta admit that FrankyBoys continuous attempts in dragging me into his idea of tech-talk started to get on my nerves, I guess I never really was able to listen to his righteous rambling for more the 2 hours but by now I reached a personal record of 6 hours.
Anyway back to work and clean up Windows XP, tune it and tweak it so it’ll perform super fast! Was loving it , cause by know Frank and Erika have gone to sleep and I finally am left alone to concentrate on the end stages of the installation.
Before I installed the Scasi Hard drives I just wanted to test the system a bit and increase the FSB to 159 x 12 which gave me 1908 MHz ! Sure that mobo can do much , much more if I’d have used some corsair memory and proper cooling and so on . Although I did the sensible thing and but everything on default again before installing the Scasi adapter and the hard drives.
And with this and some more tweaking of the OS and after installing Office XP pro , Photoshop , auto cad and all the drivers I went to bed (actually couch) at around 4am with a satisfied tired feeling.
At 9 in the morning I can hear some noises and get up to face the lovely family life again, ready to go back to the city , back to see my friends , back to civilization and to my own life.

and the moral of the story ? wait for PART TWO for a little giggle !