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Building Your Own PC. Part 3 Can’t find the ideal PC? Why not build your own – Iain Laskey did. In part two I looked at putting all the hardware together. Now it is the turn of the software side of things along with the finishing off of the system. Dare to be Bare In part two the physical parts of the PC were assembled. Now it’s time to install Windows. The full version of Windows 98 comes with a bootable floppy disk to get things started. A bare system devoid of any operating system isn’t able to use the CD-ROM drive to install Windows 98. Accordingly, Microsoft supply a bootable floppy disk. I should note at this point that some non-Windows operating systems can be supplied on a bootable CD, making installation a case of loading the CD and switching on. Windows 98 isn’t one of those unfortunately but it’s not much harder! Boot Camp Insert the floppy disk, load up the Windows 98 CD-ROM and switch on. Make sure that you have set the BIOS to allow booting from the A: drive. I tend to set mine to boot from C: only and initially I forgot to set this back to A: Oops. The floppy disk reads in just enough of an operating system to detect the CD-ROM drive and to set up the hard disk. After a few moments, the Windows 98 installation screen appears. From this point on it is simply a matter of following the prompts. The installation routine asks if you want a standard setup or if you wish to choose which parts of Windows 98 you want to install. In most cases you’ll want to accept the default settings.
The next stage involves formatting and setting up the hard disk. This can take a while depending on the size of the hard disk. Time for more tea. Once formatted, the various system files are copied over. A few reboots and a bit more file copying and low and behold, your new PC boots up into glorious Windows 98. There’s More? Now, you may be tempted to stop right here and call it a win. However, Windows 98 ships with a set of drivers for most hardware you are likely to throw at it. It is possible that during the installation it may have requested one or more driver disks that came supplied with your graphics card or sound card etc. The chances are these aren’t necessarily the most recent though. Time to check for updates. I am a big fan of Quarterdeck’s CleanSweep and use it all the time to uninstall software and to tidy up leftover files. It makes sense to install it on a new PC before anything else so if you have this or a similar utility, now is the time to install that.
Next up, install your favourite Internet software. This is probably going to be the AOL software, now at version 4. You may wish to install another though. Once done, log on and check the web sites for the various bits of hardware you have installed for new or updated drivers. Download these and install as required. Also, use Windows 98’s Windows Update option to get any fixes for Windows itself. There are already quite a few so I’d recommend doing this in the evening or weekend when phone calls are cheap as you could be online for an hour or two. Protect and Survive Once you have the patches installed, it would be wise to install a good anti-virus package. I use Symantec’s Norton Antivirus but you may prefer a different one. For the really careful people out there you could install this before you even log on to the Internet but as long as you stick to official support sites for established companies, you ought to be safe. Just in case though, do a full virus check once the software is installed. Fine Tuning Most people have a few tweaks and settings they like to use. Open the control-panel and make any adjustments needed. Set the screen resolution and colours too.
If you have a tape streamer, now would be a good time to install the software and to perform a full backup. This way you have a copy of how things were when the machine was new and running smoothly. If things go awry later on, you can use this backup tape to recover from. In extreme cases where you may decide to wipe the hard disk clean and to start from scratch, this could save time as you would simply need to install a minimal Windows configuration and the tape recovery software before using the tape to rebuild the PC. Finishing Off Your PC should now be up and running in all its glory. You can now install all your other software as required. It is also worth taking time to power down, open the case again, tidy up the cables and ensure everything is snugly fitted. Overclocking This is where I admit to one sneaky trick. Earlier on I mentioned my intention to overclock this PC. Having made sure everything worked fine at its intended speed, namely 333 Mhz, I decided to try and get an extra bit of go out of it. Overclocking is a process whereby you fool the system into running the CPU at the wrong speed. Intel have made various attempts at stopping this practice but current Celeron CPUs still allow it in a limited way. The motherboard is very flexible and allows all kinds of strange settings. I initially experimented with 500Mhz by setting the system bus to 100Mhz. The Celeron 333 has a multiplier of 5 which means it runs at 5X the bus speed. Once set, I rebooted. The system fired up first time at 500Mhz. Very fast indeed for an £80 chip and rather good compared to the Pentium II equivalent costing some 4-5 times as much. However, after a few hours it started getting a bit glitchy and was obviously running too hot. I changed to a bus speed of 83Mhz giving me a CPU speed of 415Mhz. This proved to be very stable and the machine has been running constantly at that speed ever since. I never turn off any of my PCs so constantly is no understatement. Overclocking is a very powerful trick but can potentially fry your CPU. It needs to be carried out with care. Keen overclockers chatter happily about additional fans, thermal grease and other more esoteric ways of getting rid of excess heat allowing them to run at some amazing speeds well beyond any commercially available CPUs. For more information in this area you may want to look at Tom’s Hardware (www.tomshardware.com) or Sharky Extreme (www.sharkyextreme.com) for some in depth help and information. Note that Practical PC cannot be held responsible from any damage incurred from this practice! Conclusion I’ve changed and upgraded most parts of a PC over the years but this was the first time I’ve built one completely from scratch. It has been very rewarding putting it all together and seeing the pile of delivery boxes turn into a fully functional machine that is both speedy and fully designed to meet my own needs. If you’re feeling brave – give it a go!
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