Couple Bonding Through PC Building

mikemuch writes "When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself. She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list, and then watched as she did all the screwdriver wielding herself. Despite a DOA hard drive and some mis-connected wires, everyone was smiling when it was all finished. (Slide show here.)"

Comments

How is this news?

[matts-reign]

Person puts computer together while boyfriend watches. Why is this on the front page of slashdot?

Re:How is this news?

[91degrees]

A geek managed to watch and not interfere while someone with less experience than them assembled a PC!

Have you any idea how difficult this is? We're all control freaks.

Re:How is this news?

[Opportunist]

Person puts computer together while boyfriend watches. Why is this on the front page of slashdot?

1. That person is female. Not that girls can't build computers, but rather that ...
2. A geek has a female SO.
3. Power tools.
4. Shiny new hardware.
5. Girl with power tools and shiny new hardware.
6. Quite attractive girl with power tools and shiny new hardware.
7. Quite attractive geek girl with... you know the rest.

I think it ain't so much that it's a computer or that she's female. It's a combination thereof. Oh, and, yeah, she built it or something. Did anyone actually read the article? Oh, suuure.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not ugly? You better get somebody to drive you to the optometrist, you're obviously way overdue for a checkup.

Re:How is this news?

[Hal_Porter]

Bolting PC parts together is not engineering.

Re:How is this news?

[Chrisje]

Hahahaha... You're such a bloody idiot, really.

I am a Dutch Atheist, you insensitive clod. You don't know me, so don't even try. But it might please you to hear there is not a drop of Jewish blood in my veins. Certainly also because (and this might interest you) Jewish blood does not exist.

Genetic research has long ago proven that our genes do not differentiate enough to call differently shaped humans "races". There is one "race", the human race. The rest are just minor adaptations to climate and diet.

My partner however, is Jewish (by faith) Israeli. She is *not* causing havoc in your "great" nation. It's imbeciles like you that do.

Re:How is this news?

[dprovine]

I will not, however, partake in ceremonies that have their roots in organized religion. So no, I would not consider getting married.

Marriage went on for centuries (maybe millenia) without organized religion's involvement. The early Christian church had no marriage services, and did not keep records of who was married to whom. That was a civil job.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, the church took over registering of marriages and births because there was nobody else to do it. (That's also how the Pope ended up administering so much of Italy: the job needed to be done and no one else was around.)

The notion that Christianity (or Judaism, or whatever) invented marriage is silly. Marriage (at least here in the USA) serves explicit legal purposes that have nothing to do with religion. There has been more than one case wherein I have gotten a mindless paper-shuffling droid to shut up and do his job by saying "I'm her husband", which cuts through rubbish like nothing else.

I dunno what the legal situation is where you are, but I'd be astonished if there's a quicker way to establish in people's minds that two people go together than to say "We're married". Why do you think so many gay people want to get married? To get official recognition for their rights.

Re:How is this news?

[couchslug]

"I can own many things, but not my partner. She stays as long as she wants me, and vice versa. And it is good."

With a wise attitude like that, your odds are good she'll stay a very long time.

Re:How is this news?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

OTOH she still had to get her husband to authorise a loan from the bank.

... which any woman should do anyway, even today, unless she's doing it on behalf of a corporation.

When you're married (and in the absence of a prenuptial agreement), all your assets are co-owned with your spouse, which means your creditors will come after both of you when the sh*t hits the fan. You have to be a pretty big asshole to get a loan without clearing it with your spouse first.

WTF?

[gowen]

Geek has girlfriend. Film at 11.

Look, I'm sure this was fun, and all, but seriously... When did "Stuff that matters" become "Some guy's holiday snaps."

Re:reality

[gowen]

This article doesn't read so much as "hey guys, it's possible for a girl to put together a PC"

And even if it did, how patronising is THAT? This isn't 1870. In the past 150 years, women have discovered elements, invented whole new areas of mathematics, unravelled DNA, walked in space, become Prime Ministers and Presidents, run multinational companies, fought and died in wars, raced stock cars, and ... well, pretty much everything men can do except a very narrowly defined range of elite athletic performance.

And the only reason it took so long is that we men did everything in our power not to let them.

Now, we're supposed to wonder that a woman used a screwdriver without impaling herself through the hand?

Pass.

what a shitty BF though..

[Indy1]

he made her install Vista. Shame to build such a nice box, and put the worst possible OS on it.

Interesting? Not really.

[Merritt.kr]

I'm a girl. I build and rip apart computers all the time. And every time I do, MY girlfriend is always bugging me to let her get in there with the screwdriver! Maybe I should write up a story and take some pictures: "The lesbian geek couple mess with computer innards!" Oooohhh.

Re:reality

[QuantumG]

Not to be politically incorrect, but the fact is that the vast majority of women will not even attempt what this woman has, where-as the vast majority of men will.

I'm sure every time someone puts up a blog about how they raised a barn on the weekend (complete with happy snaps) the people in the developing world think "yeah, so what?"

It's not a question of capability..

Re:reality

[gowen]

whereas the vast majority of men will.

Really? The "vast majority" of men will build, or consider building, their own computers. You really believe that? The vast majority?

You really, really need to widen your social circle. The vast majority of men, and a vaster majority of women, are about as likely to build their own PCs as they are to build their own houses.

Let's all take this as a reminder to

[The Iso]

Go to the Firehose and bury inconsequential stories.

Windows Experience Index?

[QuantumG]

Having seen this screen shot I had to ask, what is a Windows Experience Index? It seems this machine has a score of 5.6. Great, what's that out of Microsoft? 10? That's pretty crappy. Maybe it's out of six?

So I googled for a bit and eventually found this page. Which says "The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9." WTF? So it's out of 4.9 and you just add 1 for fun, is that it? I wonder if it's a linear scale or what.. maybe it's logarithmic.

If this is how broken the business rules of their software are, I can only imagine how broken the implementation must be.

Microsoft, you're a disgrace.

A slap in the face of gender equality

[zarkzervo]

My significant other plays video games, has a far better computer than I and she actually played Planetarion. I don't consider my story newsworthy.

This is just another way of saying: "Hey, World! Here on Slashdot, we consider women far inferior to men when it comes to technology. We can't imagine girls interested in computers, so we will make it a headline whenever a girl tries something techy."

Come on!

Diggified?

[nephridium]

I'm usually not one that compares slashdot with the digg, but seeing TFA I have to wonder whether this might have something to do with the firehose being recently opened to the everyone? As we know from all sorts of media, be it TV (24h "news" networks), digg, youtube etc. the most popular story isn't necessarily the most informative story (unfortunately quite the contrary).

Why is IT missing females? Articles like this one!

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

And you wonder why IT is so short on females. It's because of the condescending ... ooooh, look, they can even build computers ... attitudes. Try working around that atmosphere for a few weeks and you'll either quit or be arrested for going postal.

The only hard part about building a computer - for females - is having some guy who thinks that his dick is an essential tool for building anything try to take over. It's no harder than, say, sewing up something with 17 pattern pieces. The instructions on recent mobos are easy to follow ... easier than the care tags on some clothing.

Clap... Clap... Clap

[fxPPC]

As a girl, I'd have to say "so what" about this posting. I built my own Hack-intosh from spare parts and I'm in the process of doing it again for a friend. I'm the network administrator for a hospital. Shock! Horror! She knows how to build computers. Please, can everyone just get over it. It makes my blood boil when I see a tech story on girls being able to do to same tech work as men. Guys can claim hard physical labor, but women are very suited for tech work. Tests show we're better at logic problems, our hands are normally slimmer, so we can reach into small places, and women are statistically better team players.

Hogging the spotlight

[Avatar8]

The article was supposed to be about the girl and her experience building the computer. Her comments took up all of 10% of the article. The rest of it was all the author's opinion of why he chose certain components. This smacks of an editor asking for a campy, personal bit and it gets interjected into the "How to Build a Mid-priced, Mediocre Gaming System."

While I can appreciate Glenda's (the girlfriend) desire to experience this, I pity the pain she'll feel over the next two years and I hope she blames her boyfriend. Whenever something goes wrong, she'll question herself of whether or not she did something wrong. When she calls him to fix it, he'll likely push it off as "This is your computer; you built it." When it can no longer handle new applications or games since 2GB is the realistic minimum for Vista, she'll wonder why her boyfriend let her install it when she could have been appreciating the speed of this system on Linux or XP.

Good learning experience. Here are the lessons:

1. It is currently no cheaper to build your own system than it is to purchase a pre-built one from a reputable company. http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/cfgpd.asp?v=d (Plus you don't have to cut yourself building it.)
2. One to three year warranties from said reputable company are priceless.
3. When something goes wrong, you don't have to doubt yourself or pester your live-in PC support.
4. Vista currently sucks. We'll see if SP1 fixes it.
5. Inserting your girlfriend's brief experience of building a PC into your component choice opinion article does not make for worthwhile reading.

Congratulations to Glenda for completing this task. Now you'll know better to take the easier, same-price route the next time.

...Then it won't be

[Nerdposeur]

...but I will not be lured into the naive and stupidly romantic gesture of telling everyone this will be "forever".

Relationships are not easy. I think it's precisely the fact that I'm determined to stay married that will enable me to do so. If I said "I'm not making any promises," that would create insecurity for both of us ("Did I make him mad? Does he want to leave?"), thereby making it more likely that we'd fight and give up.

Genuine commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy - and so is the lack thereof.