I'm a DIY person, so it's not surprising that I prefer to setup my own PC by buying the parts and assembling them myself to the configuration that I wanted. Since the 386 era, I had assembled a couple of PCs and when they outgrew my needs, I'd upgrade the CPU, RAM, video card or simply assemble a new PC and give away the old PC to some needy students. My current PC is just over 10 years old now:
The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 with an E8400 Intel Core 2 Duo processor and four 1GB DDR2 SDRAMs. The video card is an NVidia GF8600GT with 512MB RAM. The original 250GB hard drive running Windows XP had died and was replaced with a 500GB running Windows 7, followed by a 1TB running Windows 10 since mid last year.
Recently, my old trusty desktop PC started showing signs of aging. Sometimes it let out a long beep followed by a few short beeps as it power up and simply hangs; other times, it run through a series of POST, turns off and repeats the same sequence again. This usually goes away after I adjusted the video card and supported it with an ice-cream stick to keep it level since the motherboard is affixed to the chassis vertically. Yeah, it's a crude fix but hey, it works...
Anyway, two days ago when it booted up, I noticed that the reported RAM was 3GB instead of 4GB and realized that one of the SDRAM module is dead. This was confirmed when I swapped them and the PC just hanged and refuse to boot. In the end, I took out two of the modules and reduce the memory to just 2GB. Now it boots up normally.
I'm not about to throw my old workhorse away just yet since it still functions well. In fact, I decided to give it more muscle and ordered a set of four 2GB DDR2 SDRAM modules from eBay @ $20. It should arrive in two weeks time and hopefully, that will stretch the PC's usefulness another 3-5 years. That's the maximum memory capacity the motherboard can handle anyway.
Ps: I had the foresight to buy a motherboard that uses solid tantalum capacitors instead of the leaky electrolytic type. That ensures better durability and is now proven to be the best value for money decision I've made.
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