In 2001 I moved to my girlfriend and she had this old 486-DX33 machine from her mother's old tailoring store.
It wasn't running very well and needed mostly 3 or 4 tries to boot up.
our neighbor had a lot to with computers , so I asked him for some spare parts. he gave me a very old machine, but for me it was like a goldmine...
64mb edo ram, a dx66 cpu, a gfx card with 8mb ram instead of 2 like our old and a bigger harddrive. assembling this two machines to one better and faster was the beginning of my "career" in building crazy and sometimes even INSANE machines.
after some months, I bought the components for my first 100% self build machine that fits modern specs:
A 750 mhz duron, 64 mb sd-ram, the K7S5A I mentioned in the other post, a 40gb maxtor hd, floppy and cd drive (I think LG) and a LC power big tower with a 350w PSU.
at this time, I still went to the computer shop whenever a problem occured with my system, I could built them, but error fixing was something diffrent.
after beein tired of spending a lot of money for the tec guys, I asked my girlfriends uncle to teach me everything he knows about computers, networking and so on.
ok, maybe not the best idea to ask a PROGRAMMER to teach you EVERYTHING....
so that is how I started.
and ehm...
you mentioned a ASUS A7N8X mobo...
just take a sneak peak at my newest project