My ABIT AA8XE FATAL1TY custom built PC from December 2004 has served me well; I bought a Pentium-4 3.2Ghz CPU that year for about US$325. At the time, I noticed there was something called an 'Extreme.' It was also 3.2Ghz, but the cost was over one thousand dollars. I passed on the Core 2 Extreme version because it was prohibitively expensive at the time.

My plain Pentium-4 3.2Ghz CPU was an LGA775 chip, so I looked for a compatible motherboard and quickly fell for the ABIT AA8XE FATAL1TY board. It had an emerging technology known as a PCI-Ex16 Graphic card slot, and lights... little red LED lights all around the motherboard. I was sold!

I picked up an ATI video card that fit that slot, 2GB of DDR2 533 RAM which was considered fast at the time, and a new 500 watt power supply. Oh, and SATA, SATA was new at the time; so I got a Western Digital SATA Raptor 7200 RPM hard drive. SATA... PCI-Ex16 Graphics... LED lights all 'round... I was stoked.

Six months later, gamers on Steam and Gamespot were telling me my CPU wasn't exactly 'smokin.' Well, the Core 2 Extreme CPU had come down in price and everybody else was 'smokin' fast, and I was left complaining about lagging frame-rates in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

I got used to my limited system though, and found ways to beat frame-rate issues by skipping the bloated heavy Oblivion MODs and adjusting my screen resolution and video quality settings in-game to something more reasonable. Still, when I got in an Oblivion melee fight with me plus 3 or more NPCs the framerates would lag again. But I still managed to enjoy Oblivion and many other games.

When I recently updated my operating system to Windows 7 my ABIT AA8XE FATAL1TY platform became increasingly unstable; the CMOS beeped and wailed like a siren at start-up more-and-more. I needed to repeatedly boot the PC by pressing the 'power on' button, get a beeping error code, then power it off and try again until it would finally boot into the operating system; but only with THE BIOS re-set to Fail-Safe defaults (and my clock set back to 2004!).

I went to ABIT for an updated BIOS version and was shocked to find a cobweb page and news that ABIT had gone out of business in 2006 or so.

I had heard every combination of POST beeps this board could make; and seen every combination of numerals, letters and decimals that the POST Code Display could flash at me.

Arriving at the conclusion that my computer was not ever going to be Windows 7 compliant, I started to buy components to assemble a new one; and have them all gathered up now.

Today I strip down my FATAL1TY and re-assemble using my new parts:

ASUS P5G41T-M LX PLUS LGA 775 Intel G41 Micro ATX Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz 4M L2 Cache 1333MHz LGA775 Desktop CPU

Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Dual Channel RAM

Radeon HD 2600 PRO PCI Express x16 video card

..to run the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system in a 32-bit environment

Again, with my old existing power supply and tower case, and anything else I can recycle...

For now, it's off to radio shack to get a three dollar tube of heatsink compound; then I enter DARK TERRITORY with my computer pulled apart on a table for god-knows-how-many-days until I can get a POST beep that brings up Windows 7 again.

Yeah, I know, my new system isn't exactly "Smokin' either .. but it's what I could afford.

Wish Me Luck.