I had forgotten the joy of building one’s own computer, since last I put one together about 3 years ago. I got all the parts for my system last night, but the bugger won’t give me any display. It started out with two long POST beeps, which the AMI BIOS specs say should be a memory or parity error. Great. After a lot of reseating (which eventually became rather redundant especially after I got out my dice and starting trying some saving rolls…) I started getting 1 long, 2 short beeps which should indicate a video display issue. Hrm, that’s not making any sense…

In the end, I’ll likely purchase a few more parts to swap around and see if something needs to be RMAd. I’m guessing either the motherboard has a problem or maybe one RAM module is DOA or the video card isn’t compatible. The one thing I don’t miss from building personal systems is the voodoo (not the card, for those old school enough…) you need to make sure all parts are compatible. A complete part list can be found on my wiki under “vmware box”.