Building Your Own PC, HOWTO

Introduction

The purpose of this article (written in first person) is to illustrate the easiest/most quickest way to build your own pc. A brief description of some pitfalls is also included to prevent fans from making mistakes.

Part 1: Getting all the parts

Before I started my research, I thought there were only 2 types of processors: Intel Pentium III and Intel Pentium IV. But about 20 min into my google query “which processor AND is best AND lol”, I realized there were more cpu’s than… probably the number of times I’ve gotten laid in the last 5 years (ok maybe days). But I was not intimated- patiently reading 2398473 reviews about every architecture, comparing prices, depth of pipelines (I like DEEP pipelines, you kno?). The AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego Integrated into Chip FSB 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 seemed pretty cool, so I was like, ok sure why not, hehe!!

The rest of the parts were all a gamble: I saw a memory chip, I bought! I saw a motherboard- I bought! I saw case, said ok fine, and bought! Saw 1 video card, and bought, b/c I need a video card…

Then about a week later, FedEx slips started to arrive: “Come get your 50lb packages”. So I take my cart to FedEx (about 100 miles away from my apt) only to find out that the parts don’t even fit into the cart. on my way home, it seemed that every male I passed felt inclined to tell me a package joke. “baby, my package is even bigger!”, “there is no handling fee for my package!” and so on…

BIG package

Part 2: Setting up the motherboard

Ok, first of all, I didn’t even know which computer part was motherboard and which part was not motherboard, until Josh showed me. Then, suddenly, everything became clear, and I knew right away what all the weird things attached to the motherboard were.

Mobo: labled diagram

Thank god for sock 939, I knew exactly where to put the processor

After putting in CPU, I took a picture of my motherboard’s profile:

Only one loose end was left untied- and that loose end was the memory chip

Part 3: Harddrive and CD/DVD

This is where the first pitfall occurred: I wasn’t sure how to put motherboard into the case, but soon figured it out b/c there’s only one way for it to go in. News fans, if you build your own PC- this is how to know where to put the motherboard: WHEREEVER IT FITS!!!!

After motherboard, it was time for the hard-drive to be connected. This was complicated, b/c it’s cage was vertical, but I wasn’t sure- how can I have a vertical harddrive:

By Default, hard-drive was vertical

But thanks to extra CS knowledge, I was able to convert:

Oh yea, fans, I forgot to say, now that I see the picture, I remember, before the hard drive, I already somehow set up the video card and the power supply. But that’s not so important as the hard drive.

Then, I started to connect the DVD/CD drive, and this where the second pitfall occurred: I suddenly became very aroused by the master/slave relationship between the ide disks. Lets’ take a look….

This kind of relationship is my dream come true

That’s why I wore only a bra while working on the pc

(well, also b/c I was getting really sweaty)

You can see from the picture above (it’s a little bit censored) that I made sure to only wear a bra during the entire pc-set-up process.

Part 3: The case

My case came with a very huge metal air-shaft, and it was time to set it up. The shaft further contributed the master/slave relationship:

Shaft

Finally, PC is complete

Part 4: Turning on the PC

For this part, I wore rubber gloves, stood on a rubber bag, and had a bucket of water ready (for power extinguishing). Then, I quickly flipped on the power with the rubber glove and moved away ASAP.

Fortunately, no blackout and/or massive fire occurred

Part 5: Partitioning

Ok, before talking about part 5, I must mention that I don’t even have a desk in my apt that won’t collapse under the weight of the monitor. So my original set-up looked like this:

Set-up (with labels)

Another pitfall occurred right away: When trying to partition my hard-drive, I kept saying fdisk /dev/hda. Fdisk kept saying: NO HDA FOUND!!!! OMG!!! No hda!! This meant- I couldn’t partition.

Fans- if you don’t know what is fdisk or what is hda or even what is partition- that is ok. Proceed to part 6.

After calling Josh (huge hax) and realized I had to say /dev/sda b/c of sata, and then partitioning was fine.

Part 6: Installing the OS

When it was time to decide which OS to install- I picked Gentoo because I REALLY like portage trees. Fans, if you don’t know what is portage trees- proceed to part 7.

So anyway, the install went pretty well, although I have to say- gentoo is a bit buggy for amd64. Some dependency issues here and there… hrmmm….

Gentoo install

Part 7: Conclusion

In conclusion, I named my pc cbomb, and it seems to be doing fine. I’ll have screen shots as soon as I set up gnome… which might be never. Cheers!

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