• The first thing our group did was to open the case. Of course our team had it upside down (no clue at first from the four little feet on the side panel until that duhh moment).
• After removing the side panel and the green fan unit, we found a large heat sink under which resided the 1.8 GHz, 1.75v Intel Pentium 4 chip. The chip located in a specific position with a small arrow on the corner lining up with a corresponding mark.
• After replacing the heat sink we then placed two RAM 128MB DDR memory boards into the two available slots and locked them into place. We attached two snap-in rails to the IBM Deskstar 20GB hard drive and slid it into the HD bay until it snapped into place.
• The power and IDE cable were then connected to the motherboard for data transfer followed by the 4-pin power connection. The optical drive was already connected to the motherboard, as was the floppy disk drive.

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• Following the instructions provided, we proceeded to identify on the I/O panel the USB ports, PS/2 port, parallel port, etc. There were five expansion slots available inside; three PCI, one PCI2 and one AGP video card slot that appeared to be added at a later date.
• Next step was to close up the unit after double checking all the connections. We ran power cords to the PC and monitor, monitor cord to the PC, then plugged in the mouse and keyboard to the I/O panel connections. We applied power to the PC and monitor.

• After pressing F2 during start-up to get into the BIOS, we discovered the HD was not found and went through the menus to turn on the primary HD. The password was already disabled. We verified all settings one by one and set them accordingly.
• We rebooted the PC to verify proper start-up; then shut down, discharged the system (held the on/off button down to remove any residual power from the system) and removed all power cords.
• We then disconnected the monitor, keyboard and mouse and opened up the PC cabinet (without a second duhh moment). All the components and connections were pulled per the instructions.

Our group, through a few error corrections, finally got the PC to start up properly, but we had an issue! What good is a computer without a way to use it? We needed an operating system, and we needed it bad. In midst of our mind twirling dilema, a ray of light began to shine. It was the instructor…

“We have a hoard of operating systems on our network, class!”, he said (possibly without the exclaimation. I really don't remember.) with a gleem in his eye.

Ubuntu? WTF is that?!

The class… didn't… exclaim aloud, but may have mentally. We learned that we were able to install our operating system directly off from the network, which made the necessesity of having a physical disc moot. All we needed to do to enable the option for us to boot off from this networked device was enable PXE booting in our BIOS. We, then, were granted the option to choose one of the vast number of operating systems. We had options of all sorts of different formats of the Ubuntu OS, but we went with what was probably the most common (default) of Ubuntu's desktop environment. After getting it fully set up with username / password we arrived at the “desktop” which is eerily reminiscent of an M.A.C. computational atmosphere. :)