New Member of the Family

Published August 12, 2004

This afternoon, I finished building my brand new PC (which I'm posting this from right now). It is the first PC I've bought in over 4 years, and is the first PC I've ever built by hand. Why a PC? They can come in really handy for school, I want to play some games, and I want to try out .NET. It is also nice for cross-platform website testing. So, I'd like to tell you the story of its birth.

First, the components. I purchased everything from NewEgg because I'd heard good things. The purchase itself went smoothly, and everything arrived quickly, coming in 4 separate boxes. Here's what I got:

• AMD Athlon64 3000+
• 768 MB of Crucial PC3200 DDR 400 RAM
• Albatron K8X800 Pro Motherboard
• Radeon 9800 Graphics card
• Toshiba DVD-RW+
• Generic Floppy Drive
• 200 GB Seagate Harddrive
• RAID Max case with 450W Power Supply. Includes two front USB ports, as well as a front headphone and front mic plugs. Also has case temperature and harddrive activity displays on the front. Had three fans, one of which is temperature activated. It runs pretty cool at this point.
• Windows XP Home

On to the assembly. I'm doing this from memory, so I may forget something. Unscrewed the case panels, removed the power supply and rear fan, to make motherboard installation easier. No sweat there. Unpacked the motherboard, which came with just about a million cables, plugs, etc. Read the motherboard instructions.

First Step: Processor Install

Gulp. Extracted the delicate $175 Athlon64 from its ridiculous plastic box along with its gigantic heat sink and fan. Read the motherboard instructions again. Seated the processor onto the motherboard, oriented correctly. Now, the touchy part, clamping the heat sink down onto the processor. Using what I thought to be excessive force, this was done. Hooked up the fan power cord.

Second Step: Memory Install

I had three sticks of memory to install, but thought this would be easy, as I'd installed memory into a first generation iMac, which has to be one of the most difficult memory installs ever, anywhere. As it turned out, this step probably took me longer than any other. It took me quite some time to build up enough frustration to push hard enough to get the memory to lock into place.

Third Step: Motherboard Install

Stuck the whole motherboard into the case. Pretty painless.

Fourth Step: Drive Install

Installed the optical drive and hard drive. This was painless. At this point, I did not have the floppy drive (which I'll get to later)

Fifth Step: Video Card Install

Also painless.

Sixth Step: Random Motherboard Fiddling

Hooked up the USB and Firewire ports, the front panel ports (USB and sound). Hooked in various power supply cables. Plugged in the switches (power and reset) and the harddrive LED cable.

At some point in there, I'd reinstalled the power supply and the rear fan. At this point, everything was hooked up. I hauled a monitor down to where I was working in preparation for the moment of truth. Plugged in keyboard, monitor, and power. Flipped the switch, pressed the button, and... nothing.

Crap. Puzzled over things for a minute of two, and realized I had the power switch cable backwards. Fixed that, flipped the switch, pressed the button, and... things happened! Fans starting spinning, but then...

YOUR CPU MAY HAVE A PROBLEM

So spoke the Voice Genie, scaring the bejesus out of me. Quickly powered off the PC. Scratched my head, paged through the instruction manual, found nothing. Quick call to tech support: Reset the CMOS. OK. Did that and it booted up! Got into the BIOS, where it looked like all of my hardware was being recognized correctly. I was very happy. Configured the BIOS, exited, and...

YOUR FLOPPY MAY HAVE A PROBLEM

#@*$! I didn't even have a bloody floppy drive. Assuming that was the problem, I went out, picked one up, installed it, and tried again...

YOUR CPU MAY HAVE A PROBLEM

Again? OK. Reset the CMOS, and tried again. Fiddled in the BIOS. Again. And...

YOUR FLOPPY MAY HAVE A PROBLEM

Right, right, right. So, I went through a sequence like this a number of times trying to fix the problem. Along the way, I booted from the Windows install disk, and got that installed. Finally, called tech support again, and they told me to update my BIOS, which I did, and that fixed the problem. Now, my PC could boot without Voice Genie throwing a fit.

Did all the Windows stuff: activation, driver install, Windows Update, immediate Firefox download. Still need to do a burn-in, but am crossing my fingers that I won't have anything fail on me.

So, that was my first experience in building a PC. Not too bad, all things considered. A couple minor problems, which were quickly resolved by Albatron's tech support. But, I had no major disasters, and I didn't break anything, so I'm quite happy. And, I now have a PC that is wholly my own (except for the piece that Microsoft owns). Fun stuff.

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