My roommate’s computer broke a few days ago, and after diagnostic testing, discovered it was the motherboard that died. No surprise there, considering it was my old computer and it was pushed to the limit since the day I got it. So I did some research and tried to get new parts (motherboard, CPU, memory) that are faster, but still on a tight budget. I spent $200, and got her a system that is twice as fast, and should hopefully last a long time. Here’s the parts that I got: AMD Sempron 2800+ processor, MSI K8MM-V motherboard, and 512MB PC3200 Kingston DDR2 memory.

Well today while putting it together, I ran into one problem after another. First the stupid heatsink/fan retention mechanism was a pure bitch trying to secure over the processor. While using force on it, I had to be careful not to apply too much pressure, otherwise it’d crack the processor core, and that’d be $75 down the drain. Then when I got that on, the hard drive kept being recognized as a slave, rather than a master. It took 2 hours of diagnostic tests to figure out I should just pop in another hard drive, transfer the data from the old hard drive to the replaced one, and ditch the old one.

Okay, fine, got that set up, but then the video card gives me a fit. Not my fault though, ATI has some asstacular drivers, so I just went with the on-board video, which works just as well. Finally, the wireless network card software kept BSOD’ing the system, so I had to uninstall that and install generic drivers for it. Total time: 7 hours. Seven bloody hours for such a simple job, but it seems Murphy’s Law was in a harassing mood for me today.