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Building Your Own PC. Part 2 Can’t find the ideal PC? Why not build your own – Iain Laskey did. In part one I looked at buying the parts and provided some notes on why I chose the various components. In this part I'll examine the hardware side of building the PC. Before you Begin A lot of components in a PC can be damaged by static electricity. Before you start building anything, you would be well advised to purchase an earthing strap to wear whilst working on the machine. Tandy amongst others sell these. They usually consist of a wrist strap that you wear with a long trailing wire that you can connect to earth. I usually connect to a radiator or other metal pipework. This ensures any static electricity you build up will be safely dissipated before it can damage anything you are working on. Whenever you are touching circuit boards, DIMMs, SIMMs and so on, always touch the edge of the boards. Never touch the contacts or components. This is another measure to avoid static damage to the parts.
Is it all there? Start by unpacking the case and motherboard. Ensure that all the parts are present and correct. If in doubt, manuals supplied with components usually list the bits provided. You wouldn't want to get halfway through building something only to find parts are missing and you have to dismantle it all again to send back for a replacement! Motherboard Most motherboards have a series of jumpers and/or dip switches that need to be set according to the CPU and peripherals you are installing. In my case I needed to set the speed only. The manual provided clear notes on what needed to be changed and where. Once done, the board can be put in the case. The motherboard needs some support underneath to stop it cracking when you push in the CPU or any of the PCI or ISA cards. Five small rubber pyramids were provided for this purpose and these were placed accordingly. The motherboard doesn't actually touch the case and sits on top of a series of spacers to stop any short circuits. The spacers should be fitted before placing the motherboard on top of these and the rubber support blocks. Carefully screw down the board. Next up is a selection of wires that are fitted to the case. One is the power supply and this connects to the appropriate place on the board. The other wires connect up the internal speaker, if present, the hard disc activity sensor, the power light and other ancillary features. Again, your motherboard manual will advise where everything goes. The cables ought to be clearly labelled but if not, just trace them back by hand to the source to see what they are connected to.
When all that is done, you're ready to put in the CPU. Processors R Us Unpack the CPU and locate the socket on the motherboard. As noted before, the CPU speed ought to match the jumper settings you have set on the motherboard. Initially, I set my motherboard to 333Mhz, the same as the processor. The Celeron CPU fits nice and snugly in its socket and comes complete with built in fan so there is no need to fit one of those two. Memories are Made of This Now you can fit the memory. I only had a single DIMM. Holding it carefully by the sides and not touching the contacts or chips, this was gently pushed in to its socket. Small arms lock it into place when properly seated. Nice and straightforward. Sound and Vision Unpack and check the contents of the sound and graphics cards. Sound cards often come with extra cables so make sure these are all present. First, fit the graphics card. Mine was an AGP one and so didn't go into a PCI or ISA slot but instead uses the dedicated AGP slot. The PC case comes with all the rear slots covered up with blanking plates. Before you fit the graphics and sound cards you need to remove the corresponding blanking plates so that the sockets are visible on the outside. A single screw holds these in place. Keep the plates as spares in a safe place. Insert the graphics card carefully and screw it down tightly where it fits into the casing. Do the same for the audio card.
Testing Times Even though there are no drives attached, we can do a quick test to see that everything is OK thus far. Connect up the monitor and turn on the PC. You should see the system start to boot, identify the CPU type correctly and then find and test all the memory. If something is wrong then go back and check everything done so far. The chances are it's a loose connection or something not quite right with the motherboard jumpers. Assuming everything is OK, the machine should complain that it has no bootable media (this is your PCs way of asking what happened to the hard disk!). Switch off and have a cup of tea before continuing.
Driving Miss Daisy Back to the motherboard manual. Find the IDE connections on the motherboard. These are for connecting the hard disk and CD-ROM to. There are normally two IDE connections, each capable of taking two devices totalling four possible IDE devices. Each pair of IDE devices works as a master and a slave. Consult the hard disk and CD-ROM manuals for the master/slave settings of your particular units. This usually involves moving a single jumper on each. Once done, you'll need an IDE cable to connect the two to the motherboard. A cable should be supplied with either the motherboard, drives or both. IDE cables have a red strip down one side to identify pin 1. It is important the cable is inserted into both drives and the motherboard the correct way so pay close attention to the drives and motherboard, all of which should have pin one marked. Some IDE connectors will only let you plug in the correct way round, which is helpful. To fit the drives in the case, you'll need to remove the blanking plates from the front of the case. Depending on the case you'll need to slip in the drives from the front or from behind. However it is done, mount the drives but don't screw them in to place just yet in case they need to be removed again.
Connect the IDE cable to the motherboard then to the hard disc and CD-ROM drive in a daisy chain fashion. In my case it was actually a DVD-ROM drive but it works the same way. Next, look for two power connectors. There should be plenty of these, in various sizes ready for use in the case. Connect one each to the hard disc and CD-ROM. Next, remove the blanking plate for the floppy drive and fit that in the case as above. Back to the manual for the location of the floppy drive connector on the motherboard. This connects in a similar way to the IDE cable. Connect the cable from the motherboard to the floppy drive and attach a power cable. The floppy drive uses a much smaller connector for power so it should be easy to spot. In my case, the floppy drive was a 120Mb version and needed to connect to the second IDE socket on the motherboard. I also fitted the CD-ROM writer to this with the CD-ROM writer as master and the floppy drive as slave. As an aside, the manual for the floppy drive proudly proclaimed 'Errors and omissions expected' (sic) which made me smile. Most PCs wouldn't have these extras devices to worry about though. Finally, to be able to hear music CDs, you'll need to connect the CD-ROM drive to the sound card. A cable will have been supplied with the sound card and possibly the CD-ROM drive too. Manuals will again advise again where to connect.
Nearly There We are now almost ready to install Windows. If you have any other pieces of hardware such as a printer, modem or additional PCI/ISA cards then these too need to be fitted as per the manufacturers instructions. Plug in the keyboard and mouse and switch on. All being well, the machine should boot as before. As well as identifying the CPU and RAM, it should also find the hard disk and CD-ROM and report these devices correctly to the screen. If this doesn't happen, switch off and recheck all leads and connectors before trying again. You may be unlucky and have a duff component somewhere but this is rare and it is far more likely that something isn't plugged in correctly. If the hard disc and/or CD-ROM drives don't seem to be identified correctly then check the motherboard manual for the BIOS settings and how to change them. Ensure the IDE/hard drive settings are all on Auto to let the motherboard and BIOS to all the hard work of sorting out the drive identification and settings. Assuming all is well, you'll get the message again about having no bootable media. It's now time to load Windows. Before we finish though, make sure the drives are all securely screwed in to place, now that we know everything works. In the final part, I’ll look at installing Windows and ensuring all your drivers are correct and up to date.
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