After upgrading nearly every part of my aging Pentium II, Idecided I could build a PC instead of buying a new one. Would it beas easy as building with Legos? Let's just say that if you have neverswapped out a hard drive, please don't try this at home.
The most complicated part of the project was choosing theprocessor, case, motherboard, memory and so on -- all of which mustmesh properly for the PC to run at all. So I read tutorials on techsites like Sharky Extreme (http://www.sharkyextreme.com) and didcomparison pricing at PriceWatch (http://www.pricewatch.com).
I had planned to build a system around a low-cost, high-valueprocessor from AMD, but competitor Intel's price cuts and performanceincreases, combined with my desire to avoid surprises, led me tomatch a Pentium 4 with a stock Intel motherboard. Many home-buildersprefer higher-end motherboards that allow "overclocking" theprocessor to run faster than designed, but I figured I was already inenough danger of frying the computer.
The motherboard came with the standard ports (two USB, one serial,one parallel. two PS/2), five PCI slots for internal expansion and afast 4x AGP slot for a video card, with no slow ISA slots to gumthings up. It also included two Ultra ATA/100 interfaces for the CD-RW and hard drives, a floppy-drive connector, an upgradable BIOS chipto regulate all the other innards, and built-in audio and 10/100 MbpsEthernet networking. I disabled the audio so I could add my own soundcard.
The motherboard/processor combo dictated the kind of memory -- 256megabytes of RDRAM from Samsung. It also limited me to certaincomputer cases. I picked up a roomy, mid-tower housing fromSuperpower, with six front-panel drive bays and an easy-to-openthumbscrew to remove either side, the top and the front. Inside, itpacked two cooling fans and a beefy 340-watt power supply -- morethan an off-the-shelf PC, but necessary to power future upgrades.(The Pentium 4 also had its own cooling fan.)
I added a 32-megabyte GeForce2 GTS graphics card from Nvidia, thereigning 3D champ, and a Hercules Game Theatre for audio, whichincluded some clever technology to avoid hiss when convertingcassettes and LPs to MP3s. A Plextor CD-rewriter, a big WesternDigital hard drive and a generic floppy drive rounded out thepackage. (But no DVD. You have to draw the line somewhere.)
The toughest choice of all was the operating system. Tired ofWindows 98's inevitable crashes, I went with the more stable Windows2000. But to run old games, I created a second drive partition andinstalled Windows 98 on that.
I began assembling the system and immediately ran into trouble.Unlike any box of Legos, there was no single fold-out sheet ofinstructions -- I had to cross-reference manuals from Intel andSuperpower, plus directions at a third-party Web site.
The heat sink fit properly on the CPU with some "thermal grease,"but the screws Superpower provided for the heat-sink housing did notfit the motherboard. (An Intel spokesman said the company wouldconsider providing these screws itself instead of relying on thirdparties.) A trip to the nearest hardware store fixed that.
Connecting the wiring from the case's power supply to themotherboard was tricky, but the graphics and sound cards droppedneatly into their slots. Next, the hard drive, CD-RW and floppy driveslid cleanly and bloodlessly into their housings in the Superpowercase.
I put in the Windows 2000 CD-ROM and powered up the system. Itcomplained immediately: I had forgotten to plug in the keyboard! Ishut it down, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, powered it up, andthis time the whole system booted flawlessly.
After I loaded all the drivers and downloaded bug-fix updates, thePC was in business -- but its networking was not. It couldn't see anyother computers on my home network, even though it was logged on tothe Internet through the same network. Calls to Intel and Microsoftrevealed an undocumented fix and ferreted out other details missingfrom the skimpy Windows 2000 manual and hidden among online techdocuments, which brought the home network fully online.
Meanwhile, Microsoft tech support had also led me astray inadvising that I'd need to reformat the hard drive to make a systempartition bigger than 7.8 gigabytes. I found this out only after I'dused Partition Magic to set up the new drive partition.
These disasters raise the most troubling question: When a home-brewed system fritzes, who do you call to fix it? But after years ofabuse, my pain threshold for tech-support calls is high. And my newrig saved me $100 off what Dell would have charged, runs blazinglyfast, should last a long time and be easy to upgrade. Now how longuntil recordable DVD drops from $1,000 to $300?
No comments:
Post a Comment