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Getting Help Building Your Computer
An anonymous reader submitted an excellent story about getting help when assembling a PC from scratch. I'm sure many readers here know how harrowing the experience can be, and will appreciate this entertaining tale of lilliputians helping
in this rite of passage.
The first time I assembled a computer, I scratched the bottom of the motherboard on the mounting points. I completed the build, but was presented with random crashes. Found out the scratch spread metal filaments across multiple paths, fortunately rubbing the area clean solved the whole thing.
Well now it's my turn to help teach one of my friends how to build a computer! A learning experience for him indeed.
I do like his use of Lego men on the site, although the 'Red Shirt' Lego man was very lucky to survive (considering their expendability).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
The good thing for newbies is that for the most part, that isn't even an issue any more these days. So many boards are running practically jumperless. The last 5 PC's I bought / upgraded required NO jumper settings on the motherboard at all. It was pretty much nuts and bolts. Plug it in, turn it on, and go. Very smooth, very easy, you're up and running in no time flat. And the same goes with the last 50 servers I put together. The only RTFM was to connect the front panel switches and LED's correctly as the boards weren't silkscreened very helpfully. Clocks/multipliers/voltage is all pretty much automatic these days.
First time I built a machine, I kept my other machine on and logged into chat so I can get realtime advice from the geeks.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
The last time I did NOT build my computer from scratch was when I bought my 486 DX2 66MHz way back then...
That experience was enough to convince me never to by cheap premade systems: I had paid extra to get an Intel chip in there because AMD were not quite up to par back then. That extra cost me a bundle considering my budget at the time (I was about 14).
When I got my brand new 66 MHz "beast" to run Sopwith at blazing speeds, I couldn't wait to open the case up and look at my whopping 8 megs of RAM. So I did. The processor was hidden by a small heat sink that I promptly removed.
Seeing those three letters... The horror! My desolation was so great, that I swore never to buy premade systems again. Ever.
Of course the store got a visit from a very angry 14 year old and in return of a few blasphemous remarks, I got my sparkling Intel chip.
I have to say that putting your own system up is quite fun and a great learning experience.
The two things I hate the most though are trying to figure out how those darn case leds connections work and forgetting to check the master/slave/cs jumpers on the HDDs (99.9% of the time).
Good memories. Have fun!
I would have to agree and I was waiting for a 2600XP to come out before I build my new machine. However, Intel dropped the price of the 2.4 GHZ P4's and for $196 that is a steal.
I'm surprised that no one here has mentioned overclocking. I plan to crank up the 2.4 quite a lot, and get an Alpha heatsink.
What I don't understand, is all this talk of buying a "good" case. I have built 4+ computers all with low end cases. If you're clever, you find a way around thise things. Why spend 50 or 60 dollars, when you can get one for $20 (check NewEgg.com..it rocks!)? I would rather put that extra money into cooling or bumping up the video card a notch.
I used to work for a place that did a decent multimedia database, and one of the test videos we had was an Apple training video for engineers. Well, more like an induction video really.
One of the sections showed an engineer patiently assembling a Mac Plus out of various components, and his boss coming in with a client to impress. Boss picked up a board, showed client who nodded sagely, then the two walked out.
Apple's instruction to the engineer? Bin the board. They wouldn't allow it to go out having been handled by someone who might have inadvertantly aplied a static charge to it.
Now - whether this was actually carried through in practice is another matter of course. But it was certainly there on their film.
Cheers,
Ian