The Nicest Day I Had in So Many Months

Today, I started off the day by waking up at 8.20am. It broke my 2nd best record of waking up late. The best was 8.50am. My mother scolded me again. She said that I was supposed to finish practising my piano and doing a chinese comprehension before going out with my friends, because I was to meet Xiaotian at Jurong East at 9.10, so I did not have time to do all these except to eat breakfast. After eating breakfast, I took a shower and decided to wear long jeans and a black OP tee. I also brought extra short pants and white OP tee along in case I would eve need them.

Went to Jurong East and met him at 9.30am. We proceeded to Simlim Square. After about 45mins of chatting, we alighted at Bugis. I cannot reveal the content of our conversation as it is private to Xiaotian. We strolled to Simlim Square and had an argument whether to build the desktop at his house or in the shop we plan to buy the PC components at. He wanted to build there and then as he was afraid that we would meet some problems with the hardware, and I wanted to do at his house as there was more space. I fumed for several minutes, but in the end agreed. And anyway it is he who is buying the PC not me.

Walked around Simlim. A majority of the shops have not opened. The shops which are open are still not doing business, as they were cleaning up for the day. We went up and down the levels, looking at advertisements. Eventually, we walked into a stall which has opened up for business. It belonged to a friendly looking Malay(or Indian) storekeeper. Xiaotian asked if he sold PC components, and he said yes, and asked what did he want. Xiaotian replied with the following:

Motherboard, supportable up to 3.2 gHz
Processor, Intel 3.2 gHz, support hyper-threading technology
DDR RAM, 1 GB(two separate 512mb RAM chips)
Above average Graphics Card
Good Powersupply Box(for those who doesn't know, powersupply box converts electricity from the plug to a form of electricity the computer can use)
40 GB Hard disc
Casing

Altogether it all added up to about 1k. Very cheap. If you buy one in the market, a PC manufacturer for example Fujitsu would sell about 3k for the same quality. Xiaotian then began to bargain with the shopkeeper when he was paying for the items. As he wanted an 17 inch Philips LCD screen and Altec Lansing speaker system, he bargained the $600 items for $500, and throwing in a Norton Antivirus and Keyboard and $149 Ego speaker system. The shop keeper obviously declined, so Xiaotian said he did not want the keyboard and Ego speaker system and Norton Antivirus, and the man agreed,

The graphics card is also quite good. Nvidia Geforce something. Forgot the model. I think it was 7800FX or something. Xiaotian chose a futuristic white casing. It also has 3 cooling vents, two with fans. The motherboard was also not bad. It has 8 USB ports. Cool man. The man asked us if we wanted the shop people to help us fix the whole com up, but we declined the free service. Show off a little mah. Action mah. But anyway, he gave us all the separate components and the casing. We proceeded to unscrew the casing and open it up. Then we screwed in the powersupply box. The motherboard was taken out. It was very nice. The older models were much bigger and the heatsink also had a unique design. We unpacked the processor and took out the CPU fan and chip. The chip is a small nifty thing(smaller than a country-eraser) with has many pins on the underside. This is the thing that makes your computer a computer. After locking it onto the motherboard, we secured the CPU fan over it. Without this fan, the processor chip would overheat and destroy itself. Then we took out the graphics card. Very cool. And the fan has a eagle sticker on it. Quite cute la. I ripped open the plastic covering of the hard disc with a screwdriver and passed it to Xiaotian, who secured it into the motherboard. The two RAM chips were the last. Very ordinary. We handled too many RAM chips in the past, so not fun anymore. After all these, we screwed the motherboard into the casing. We were careful to elevate it from the metal of the casing, or when the electricity runs overs it, it would conduct and blow the whole com and you up(no la just kidding. It would burn and become useless semi-conductors. Burns are not insured with the warranty)

I booted up the computer and went into the BIOS setup utility, and went to prioritise the boot up. We decided to go back to XT house to install the OS(Windows XP Home Edition).

We packed up everything and sorted out the rubbish. Then Xiaotian secretely put in the Ego speaker system and keyboard into the big cardboard box of the PC casing, when I was putting in the components empty boxes in. So smart ah this guy. We happily went down with a store helper who packed all of our things onto a trolley and boarded a taxi.

Reaching Xiaotian's house, I installed the OS and I demanded him to give me his old Harman Kardon speakers, as he stole the Ego system. He agreed, but I needed to give him $15. I changed my clothes as I was sweating like hell in the long jeans and we went out to Jurong Point to eat. We met Yanling there and I almost did not recognise her in her hairstyle. We went to Seoul Garden and I paid only $5 out of the $28. Haha, so after paying him $15 tomorrow I still benifitted as I got speakers and a good meal. We ate like siao. I took all the meat available(i think 10 diff meat) and two pizzas, two plates of beehoon and yellow noodles and fishballs, crabmeat, taupok, vegetables and fries. Xiaotian made the soup very nice. He added in alot of meat and vegetables and tomatoes and mushrooms etc. and let it boil. It turned out from ginseng chicken soup into duno what, but it was very nice.

After eating so much, we went to the arcade and played Daytona for two rounds. I lost duh. It was my second time playing it. As Xiaotian's card did not have much money left, we decided to say our goodbyes and go home.

Ah what a fun day...

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