The first computer I bought I got from someone I know. Then I upgraded the CPU, RAM, added a CD, sound card, etc. I asked for him to install it. He said he would if I paid an extra $100. :) That's how I learned to put these things together!

BTW, that was a 486DX I bought years ago.

But do you blame them for asking for $100? ;-)

The neato thing about it is.. that all of the components have their own lil plugin to the motherboard.. meaning its almost fool proof... all of the adapters only plug into that adapter and make it easy not to make a mistake.. jump on in.. in fact I found a website.. Do a search.. How to buiold a computer... youll find step by step guides with pics so that you can do it yourself.. hope that helps

Myst,

One thing I have found with building or upgradping your pc is to have someone who has done it before help you if you can. It will help immensely if you run into one of those issues where nothing seems to make sense.

Also read all the documentation first and check all the diagrams first.

I just had an issue this weekend when I was taking my capture drive out of my old not-home-built computer and it wasn't making any sense until I realized the diagram WAS WRONG in the documentation.

I've built five or ten pcs (I'm vague on the numbers because some of the ones I've built I've also upgraded partially - several times). I have never upgraded (flashed) the bios of a motherboard. The things I have spent most time getting a grip on is the fdisk command and the master/slave setting of harddisks and CD-roms at various IDE channels. I'm old enough to know a few DOS commands - most of them, actually, but also to know harddisks that do not want to coexist with one another, no matter how you set their attributes (I bought my first pc in 1984). But fdisk is a very (read: extremely) useful command to know.
Go on, buy online and build a system you like, but get the motherboard, processor and RAM from the same reseller, and make sure they approve of the combination you get. Otherwise, if something don't work out, you'll have reseller 1 blaming the product from reseller 2 and vice versa. Good luck.
Don't hesitate to post questions during the process. These thing are in the interest of many here.
Tor

come on Buster.. Dont you buy the model airplains and throw the directions away before trying to build them??? lol...

My advise... Go Asus.. Asus has auto flash from file bios upgrades.. also they have less features to tweak making it more user friendly as opposed to Abit etc.. Asus is top notch from my experience..
1.Motherboard
2.CPU
3.hard drive I recommend 2 1. 40gig, 1. 100+gig
4.RAM
5.power supply
6.sound card
7.video card (Asus boards have some of this built in sound/video)
save some cash!!!!
8.DVD drive, I like pioneer
9.some IDE cables
lil cable snap ties to make it clean
I know im forgetting soemthing?????.. depends on the case you buy.. It should come with ventalation fans etc...

Cool... another convert. I remember my first, you DO kind of get a rush. Reminds me of when I built my color TV when I was a kid. That was an adventure mostly because it takes as long as it does. Maybe 50-60 hours. You're a little worried the first time you plug it in thinking you may blow up the house or something, (TV's have between 20,000-26,000 volts) but wow it worked.

There are lots of sites that walk you through the steps like:

http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/index.htm

Very roughly once you get it assembled double check that you didn't forget to plug-in the CPU heat sink fan, that the heatsink is on properly, stuff like that. The first time you power up be prepared to turn it off and I mean within a 20 seconds or less if you don't see something on the monitor. Even without doing anything beyond just putting it together you should see the inital page since BIOS is in a chip. If you don't see something on screen along with the front panel lights, and you SEE the fans spinning up, hear hard drive spinning up, turn if off and find what you did wrong. A CPU chip can burn itself up in 90 seconds or less if it gets power and the heatsink or fan isn't working right.

Assuming you get over the first hurdle, install Windows. Depending on your motherboard you may have to change the BIOS so it boots from a CD as the first device. Once you change that pop in your Windows CD and it will prompt for what to do next. About 30 minutes later Windows will have booted the system back and forth at least once, perhaps multiple times depending on your hardware. Once you past that, that install the drivers that came on the CD for your motherboard. After that get online, go to the Microsoft side, do the Windows update thing. Finally install your software. It really isn't hard. It just takes a little time. The more times you do it the faster the process goes.

Oh... don't panic if you smell like something is burning when you turn on the computer for the first time. That's the lub liquidfying between the chip and the heatsink. It should clear up quickly.

If you haven't actually put it together yet the things to watch are be VERY careful inserting the CPU into the socket. The pins do bent very easily. Its called a zero force socket for a reason. Do not use any force. The chip should literally fall into the socket. Hold it very gently by the corners, (don't touch the pins) be sure it is lined up with the key, (it can only go in one way) then when you have it maybe a 1/16 of an inch above the socklet, let go gently, then push down than little handle on the socket if the chip went it. Don't put too much lube on the chip, and be be careful putting the heatsink on. That will require some force. A lot for some heatsinks. The key thing to avoid is having the screwdriver slip and gorge out some traces on the circuit board.

Today most of the cables are what they call 'idiot proof' they only go on one way. One other area that's a little tricky is getting the wires from the front panel on the right connectors. There's one for the power, another for the hard drive, reset, the PC speaker, and one or two others.

I always had a hard time getting that glue off my fingers. ;-)

I always build my pcs and I also build some for friends. The nice thing is that it is totally custom. The thing I like most is to build silent pcs... You can't get a totally commercial silent pc :)

What components do you use to make them totally silent?

TomG

Beyond the usual things like buying a more quite power supply and case fans as goofy as it may sound, you can use insulation, even the spray on foam stuff that comes in a can that you use to fill in cracks in electrical outlets, window/door frames. Haven't tried myself, and I'm not recommending it, but I've seen web sites that go through the steps to make a more quite PC. I recall one where did an extreme version for his bedroom.

A couple sites:

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/howto/jump/0,24331,3422467,00.html

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=111

http://www.quietpcusa.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?&DID=8&Product_ID=32&CATID=6

I use products made by zalmann (http://www.zalmanusa.com/).
The flower cooler for the CPU is very silent as well as the z80HP heatsink for the graphic card, no fan at all !

I have to agree with scotty.. ASUS is an outstanding main board. I built my PC last summer, the second I'd done in as many years, and setting up the bios was a snap. There are no jumpers to set on the board, an the bios (also called CMOS in some manuals) interface is damn near idiot (read me) proof. The software package that comes with the board also includes internal temerature monitors for those that overclock. You can even add your own graphic to the boot screen. Not an essetial feature, but cool none the less. If you prefer to buy from a physical location, CompUSA has a huge selection of parts and decent prices on MB's and processors. I would recommend buying your RAM from somewhere online.. crucial.com has outstanding prices.

If only you could buy a car kit.. Imagine building a Corvette for the price of a Civic!

I don't understand the issue about cooling. Some folks say to use a half-dozen fans. My homebuilt PC is based on a T'bird 1.3GHz, which still puts out about 70w according to tomshardware.com. I use MotherBoardMonitor to keep track of the CPU, the motherboard, and the power supply temps. My generic Enlight case currently holds 6 drives (680GB total), a 4X DVD-R burner and a 52X burner. All I have for cooling is the powersupply fan and a standard-issue fan on the CPU. I've never had any heat issue--right now MBM shows the CPU sitting at 45C. Power supply temp is 42C, board is 25C. My office is about 70F, which is, uh, let's see, carry the 2.... about 22C.

Oh, by the way, the CPU is overclocked 10%. Rendering pushes the CPU temp up to about 50C.

MyST: Check our your local bookstore. Look for books with the titles similar to "Building Your Own PC." You'll probably discover 3 or 4 of them.

I'd like to thank everyone for the great help/advice!

I think another reason to get used to building my own is that future upgrades will be so much easier and cheaper. Instead of thinking of spending alot for a prebuilt, I can spend less in increments.
Case, mobo, cpu and ram to start. I can transfer my Echo Mia, ATI 7500 video card, my 2 (admittedly small, but 7200rpm none-the-less) hard-drives, my Yamaha CD burner, etc.
Later I can add a DVD burner, 3rd hard-drive, etc.
I have taken your advice to go with ASUS whenever I do uprade.

Quick question... Is there a cpu/mobo upgrade (from an 850 Athlon) I could consider that would still use my 512 megs of SDRAM? Or do you recommend ditching that and going DDR?

Again, thanks all for your help.
Now to make use of the PRINT THIS PAGE icon.

M

It sounds like some of us have been around awhile. Remember Heathkit? I know I'm showing my age. Too bad they didn't manage to hang in there long enough to catch the PC wave. It really would have been cool to have Heathkit around to choose your own components and build your own PC. In my youth I built many Heathkits which were great.

Sure do remember Heathkit. They still around? Those were the good old days.

For those either too young or not into hobbyist electronics there used to be a firm called Heathkit located in Benton Harbor Michigan. They originally came out with a "kit" to build a oscilloscope, and I do mean build, soldering one part at a time...following detailed instructions, (how I built my Color TV I mentioned several times) then they branched out into ham radio gear and other kits including all kinds of radios, TV's, computers*, even little robots. Shame, they were taken over by Zenith, and the Heathkit division has been gone for some time now at least as far as offering the kits they did. At their peak in the 70's they had hundreds of kits to pick from, priced from $10, to thousands. They had some of the absolute best ham radio gear and test equipment.

* around the time RadioShack came out with the orignial TRS 80, little more than a toy computer (4 kb RAM) powered by a Z-80 microprocessor where you stored your "programs" on cassette tape. Those were days of early Apples, PET's, and a few others no longer around.

http://obsoletecomputermuseum.org/trs80-m1/
http://skylane.kjsl.com/trs80/
http://www.portcommodore.com/commodore/pet/pet.html

OK, got me going now.

Want to see BillyBoy's very first personal computer?

A Compucolor II Ahead of its time the monitor as you can see was built-in

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=560