Conclusion
Completion date:
20 January 2000
It turned out that my beloved Asus K7M mainboard had a short in it somewhere, and I had to send it back to the vendor, Accubyte, who tested the mainboard and sent a replacement to me in nine days. Accubyte is a reputable vendor. The new mainboard worked perfectly, and after installing it I was soon booting up, fdisking and formatting my hard drive, setting up the AMI basic input-ouput system (BIOS), and installing Windows 98SE.
The computer is very stable and reasonably fast. Its speed is retarded by the IDE hard drive. My computer at my workplace is equipped with an Ultra2 SCSI hard drive and performs much better. At this time I don't have the usual ZDNET benchmarks to offer here, but maybe I will get around to that one day.
The total cost of my computer was:
- Case: 145
- CPU: 491 (ouch!)
- Heatsink: 20
- Mainboard: 148
- Memory: 424 (ouch!)
- Video: 139
- Audio: 164
- Operating system: 199
- 18GB ATA66 hard drive: 203
- Fourth generation Toshiba DVD ATA drive: 80
Total: $2013
... which is about what I expected to pay. The above expenses were ameliorated over six months. Invariably, as time passes, one can obtain faster components for the same prices. The longer you wait to build your computer, the faster your computer will be. Following this logic you should wait until you are elderly before you build your computer, or maybe leave the task in a deathbed legacy to your children.
I did not include miscellaneous items such as 3.5" floppy disc drive and keyboard and mouse because I have a stack of them in my closet. I did not include the cost of my big, absurdly expensive Viewsonic P815-4 monitor. You have to have a nice monitor. You look at the thing all day. I don't want to talk about how much I paid for the monitor.
I did not include in the above tally the unquantifiable factor of my box of junk. A computer hobbyist has a box of junk of varying size to which he or she takes frequent recourse as he or she builds his or her (whew, this gender neutral language wears me out) computer.
What did I do with the components of my former computer? It was a Celeron 300A system overclocked to 450MHz with 128MB of system memory. I built a computer for my mother using these parts.
