Solo Technology

Due to the wonders of scavenging, my daughter is getting a “new” computer today. Nothing exactly modern, but I think she’ll notice the difference — and the home office will likely be a bit cooler too.

Her old machine was based around an Athlon Tbird 900 (Asus A7V motherboard) that I built about 7 years ago. It was my primary rig for a year or so and then became various incarnations of windows & linux web servers for about 5 years. After I finally broke down and started paying for hosting, it became her desktop. I’ll miss it, but I think it’s ready for retirement. Dang thing has always generated a lot of heat. I’m surprised the CPU isn’t charcoal…

Now she’ll have a rig based around an Athlon 2600+, just like mine. A “lesser” motherboard, but it’ll be just fine for her purposes. I will have to scavenge up some ram for it though. I’d like her to have more than 512MB long term.

I ran into a snag loading XP on it this morning. No matter what I did, I’d get:

File \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded
The error code is 4

right after booting from the install CD. I re-seated everything, swapped some cables and generally dinked around for 15 minutes. Then I hit google. Didn’t take long to realize this was likely a memory issue.

Jumped into the BIOS, changed the memory speed from “AUTO” back down to “266″ like it originally was and everything is just fine now. (“back down to” is my way of admitting I’d changed it earlier… *cough*).

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