The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Roll Your Own PC - Part 2 Graeme Hague © |
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Last month, Graeme Hague described building a PC from scratch. Here is the conclusion. |
Plugging everything together in your "soon-to-be" PC needs care, patience, a bit
of space and above all else
a good light. Get one of those blinding desk lamps that shines directly
downwards, commandeer the dining table for the day and give yourself plenty of
room.
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Even better, swallow your pride and invest ten bucks in a pair of those
magnifying reading glasses. They're great for showing the fine print on
motherboards and finding the screws you'll drop on the floor. Hello Mother We're back to motherboards again and the good news is they're actually pretty hard to get wrong. Plugging in graphics cards and RAM has quite a "square peg won't go in a round hole" kind of aspect. If it doesn't seem right, it's not right and you're looking in the wrong place. Sometimes they need a firm hand for a solid connection though. Attaching the CPU is by far the most frightening thing. Four thousand pins need to locate in four thousand holes and if you bend one it's game over. Just imagine you're Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible deciding if you want to cut the red wire or the blue to defuse the bomb and the care factor will get you through. Default BIOS and jumper-pin settings are usually fine to start with. Options such as RAIDing your hard drives can wait. A lot of the motherboard and CPU instruction manual deals with things you don't care about - yet. Take things slowly and you'll be fine. Power supplies, by the way, often have plenty of extra connections for various components so don't worry if you seem to have a few spare leads hanging around. Also some will provide a handful of adapters, rather different kinds of plugs- don't be in a hurry to throw out the box! Wearing a static electricity strap is a good idea, but to be honest I've never bothered. Sensible clothing and footwear (to avoid cheap carpets that can crank up a zap if you shuffle your feet) are a must. And don't eat toast. Bread crumbs are a "bath plug" to get out of RAM slots. |
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So am I being a bit blase about all this? Surely it can't be that easy? Well
it's not child's play - and it's not rocket surgery either. Yes, there are a few
moments when you'll need to take a deep breath and steady the hands. You might
need to set a few jumper pins according to the RAM you're
installing. Otherwise it's surprisingly straightforward and a heap of fun.
There is a place for everything - every connection - and everything goes in its
place. A golden rule
is that all things need connecting to somewhere. The motherboard will give you
all the answers.
One end result is a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. Another is exactly the
PC you wanted. It can be done during a lazy afternoon
with a few beers in the fridge. When you finally hit the power button and
everything comes to life properly you'll feel like you've invented
the time machine or something. Awesome! Then all you have to do is install
Windows and the rest of your software. All you have to do? Hah! That's another
story.
| What About Warranty?
asks Paul Zucker. One aspect of building versus buying a PC that may be forgotten is the warranty. When you buy a pre-built PC not only is the hardware guaranteed to work (and keep working for the warranty period) but the installed software is usually also part of the warranty. That is, if they sell you a Windows Vista PC and the sound doesn't work properly because there's no proper Vista driver for it, you have a right to expect that they'll rectify the problem or give you your money back. If you build your own system then largely you're on your own. Yes, each component will have its own warranty, but that doesn't help you much when the component itself works - but just not in your system. That's why many self-assemblers choose to buy all, or at least most, of their components from the one dealer. You might pay a little more to do it this way, but since the dealer is now part of the process, they'll be able to suggest components and warn you of likely problems. In fact, some dealers will even give you a system- warranty even though you're assembling the system. And don't forget that you can still design the system (in collaboration with the dealer) yet have them assemble it in order to get a full "system" warranty. One other word of warning here - extended warranties can be useful in some circumstances, but the general "extended warranty" add-on that the mass merchants try to get you to buy is a standing joke in these stores. They make huge profits on these, which must tell you that they aren't worth much to the poor old buyer. |
Note: Graeme Hague © Permission to copy or quote extracts from this article may only be done with the written permission of the author.
Reprinted from the October 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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