Time to say goodbye to the faithful Pentium II 350, which has helped me
go through 4.5 years of university. It’s time to move on with life..

Went to Computer Fair @UNSW,
bought P4 2.4GHz, Gigabyte motherboard (was looking for an Asus, but the good
ones were all gone), 512 MB RAM and a casing, all under $650, about $200 less
than what I expected to spend.

Assembled a new PC, it’s a P4 2.4 Ghz, took about 1.5 day to get it worked.
The main problem was a faulty 512 MB DDR RAM, the motherboard was beeping
furiously everytime it boots. It’s quite frustating, not knowing what was
wrong. The cabling and connection all seem right. Found out from the net
what the beeping was all about here.

3 things might caused the problem: memory,videocard or motherboard problem,
few sites strongly advised that memory was the most likely cause. Gambled by
buying a new memory module, bought a 256 MB DDR RAM module for $64 from
THX, was actually wanting to get it from
Computer world , but was ignored by
the salespeople there (not good customer service!).
Squezed in the new memory, turned on the CPU with a little prayer.. and
the beep was not heard, problem solved? well, almost..

The harddisk didn’t work on the new system, it booted up, but none of OSes
(Windows XP, Windows 98 and Mandrake Linux) was able to run. Not really sure
why, but the problem was solved by re-installing XP, Linux problem was partially
solved still can’t start the X, dont really bother with windows 98, it will soon be
wiped away anyway. What a day, but satisfaction in the end, considering work as
computer assembler…