March 6th, 2011
*I know it is late to post this, but there were just too many assignments before this.

This time is basically a follow-the-steps type of tasks. One of the founder Terry had the instructions typed up and printed to a sort of manual in putting the computer together, despite some confusion in the layout.

The workshop was in a donated basement, awfully cold on winter days. And due to the worry that heaters pop the fuses, the heater was turned on and off through out the session. Each person was assigned a table and to work on a machine. We were told that once we got used to it, we will be able to run several machines at the same time.

Once we got the machine, we were to go through a series of analysis on whether the hardware is set to running standard.

Basic hardware ranges from...
CPU: 1.7~2.4 GHz (single core)
RAM: 512 MB
HDD: 15~20 GB
Optical: CD-R/CD-WR only
Other: 3.5" floppy disk drive

these are the commercial computer standards of almost a decade's old! Yet when the operating system and the optional programs are installed, they run at quite amazing speed in comparison to today's standard. The 15 to 20 GB hard drive is not much, but if the people receiving the computer do not do anything too fancy with it, I can see that it will be enough to support many important operations. (no matter how fancy Microsoft makes a text file, not unless you type up a million words. an average text file never gone past the size of 1MB. But to those who does not have a computer before, it is better than nothing.)