HOW TO BUILD A COMPUTER 101
Date: 10/8/00
By: Rice
Putting It All Together:
This section of the guide will cover the physical aspects of putting all the parts together. I will definitely use terminology here, and most of them are explained in the previous section. I suggest you either get it down pat or swap back to refresh your memory if you're a bit hazy on it. I will also go through how to format and partition a blank hard drive for Windows 9x/ME with fdisk. Ready?
First thing you want to make sure is that you have a nice, expansive workspace devoid of any carpeting. It's important that you don't get static electricity all over your fingers or something, because you'll end up zapping your components. It looks cool, but when you find out you have a dead piece of hardware on your hands, it doesn't seem so cool anymore.
Setting up the skeleton:
Now, bust out your favorite flathead screw driver. I personally just use the handy dandy blade of my pocket knife. You'll want to setup the motherboard into the tower first. Open up your case, and a bunch of screws and other small tools should be inside. Now, if you got a good motherboard, it should come with good documentation, and it'll have detailed pictures on how to setup spacers onto the tower that'll hold the mobo.
If not, here's a quick crash course. Dig into the bag of screws that came with your tower and look for the biggest, weirdest screws that aren't really screws. Those should be spacers, and you should have maybe 9 or so of them. Some might even be plastic. What you need to do now is to place those spacers underneath the motherboard where it screws in.
The purpose is to leave a little space between the base of the case with the board, or else the metal-on-metal will cause the circuits to go haywire. There are a lot of different types of spacers and an equal amount of difference in setting them up. If your tower comes with a nice manual, it should be well diagrammed. If not, you just have to experiment.
Keep in mind, the goal here is to put the spacers onto the base, then set the motherboard on top of these spacers and screw the screws into those spacers. If you're lucky, some towers won't be requiring spacers because it's already integrated as little humps. In that case, just match the mobo (motherboard, if you've been wondering what I meant by mobo) on top of them as you would with spacers and screw it in.
P.S. This shouldn't be an issue, but check the upper right section of the tower for an ATX backplate. Just see if there's a big gaping hole where there shouldn't be one. If so, you gotta stick the backplate on, and it should be provided and all you gotta do is snap it on. It's where you plug in your keyboard, mouse, USB peripherals, parallel and serial ports.
Fun with jumpers:
Motherboard technology has definitely been making strides lately, but unforunately, jumpers still exist and you gotta get your hands dirty plucking at them. That's the bad news. The good news is that most of the default settings work fine, and you won't have to screw around with them. However, it's still best if you flip through that motherboard manual of yours and make sure everything is where it's supposed to be. Trust me, right now, your best friend is that mobo manual. Get to know it well.
A jumper is a tiny little cap-like thingy that you stick on top of a bunch of spikey metal parts. That's about as kiddie as I can put it. The top of that cap is attached to a sliver of conductive metal, and by sticking that cap on top of the spikey protruding metal parts on the motherboard, you close the circuit and allow electricity to run through to generate the desired effect.
With a jumperless CPU setup motherboard, it's a lot easier. You can't do anything now, because to access the multiplier et al., you'll need to get into the BIOS. You know, that screen in the beginning whenever you're booting up that asks you to hit the DEL button to enter CMOS.
If you didn't get a jumperless CPU setup motherboard, then you gotta dig into that manual once again and look up the jumper settings for the particular multiplier, FSB, and core voltage your chip uses. A quick refresh example: Let's say you got a P3-600 MHz. The multiplier is 6.0, the FSB should be set at 100 MHz (6.0 x 100 = 600, remember?), and the core voltage should be 1.60V or 1.65V.
The next step is to stick in the proper power, reset, and their respective LED jumpers. If you don't have these down, you won't be able to power up your system by pressing the power button or reset it by the button on the tower. Not to mention you won't see the pretty lights flash that indicate hard drive activity.
What you have to look for is a bunch of crap coming out from the front of the tower. A bunch of wires with tips at the end. Bust out that mobo manual again and look for the LED section. It will have a well mapped diagram of which wire jumper fits into where. There should also be a slot for the PC speakers. That's where you hear the nice beeps when you boot up or when you have really bad errors.
Okay, now that you have the basic jumper settings down, you're getting ready for your first boot up!
Your first bootup:
By now, I'm assuming you have your motherboard fitted snugly inside the tower, screwed down securely, and all the jumpers set correctly. There are a few more things you have to do here:
1. Setup the CPU
Depending on whether you got a slot or a socket CPU, your procedures will be different. This guide recommends Socket 370 CPU's (Pentium III Coppermine cores and AMD Thunderbird / Duron), so I will spend the majority of the time detailing this.
For a slot CPU, just stick it into the area alotted for it at the top of the motherboard like you would for a video card or any other peripheral. Depending on whether you got the OEM version, your fan may or may not be pre-installed for you already. If it isn't, there should be instructions for you to follow. Make sure you have a glop of thermal grease if assembly is required. Your fan may as well be useless without it. It's either pre-supplied, or you can get a small tube at Radio Shack. When you apply it, don't be too generous. A nice, thin, opaque layer is good enough.
Now you need to give the fan some power. Protruding from the fan should be a wire with a tip at the end... a lot like the tower LED wires. Take that wire and plug it into the CPU fan pins on the motherboard. Bust out the manual and it'll tell you exactly where that is.
Socket CPU's are a bit more tricky. What you gotta do is make sure you don't apply ANY force at all when sticking it in. The appropriate term is Zero Insertion Force, or ZIF. That means if the CPU ain't going into the socket, you ain't putting it in right. First, you should lift up the bar next to the socket on the mobo. That'll shift the socket. Then, you should find two angles cut at two corners of the CPU. Match it up with the socket, and it should slide right in. Now, flip down the aforementioned bar, and you'll feel the CPU shift back into secure position.
You're not quite done yet. You gotta plop on the heatsink as well. The CPU has a little mound on top, which is actually the die itself. Don't run you knife through it or anything, because if you do, you're screwed (up). Apply thermal grease as mentioned above on the die, and gently place the heatsink/fan combo on top of the mound. On either side, there should be a clip/lock mechanism.
You gotta apply a little pressure to make it click down completely. You definitely don't want a heatsink (I'll use heatsink and fan interchangably. I mean the same thing) on the loose. If you find that it's not aligning correctly, flip the heatsink/fan around and try again. If you find that a little TOO much pressure is required, don't risk just jamming it down. Take a plier and adjust the little clip on the sides of the heatsink so it'll fit easier.
The procedure to plug the fan in is the same as the above description. Find those pins, and stick it in.
You MUST BE CAREFUL while doing all of this!! Chances are you'll be sweating bullets and your knuckles might have some scrapes after you're done, but it's all worth it. A hastily done job will result in a non-functioning system at best, and blown hardware at worst. If you got an AMD Duron or Thunderbird, you need to be even more extra careful. Cases of blown AMD CPU's are all over the place because heatsinks were attached too roughly.
2. Setup the RAM
This shouldn't be too hard. Pick up that stick of RAM, and snap it into the DIMM slot. It should be a row of 3 or 4 small, dense slots to the right of the CPU. Don't worry about putting it in backwards or whatever, because it's cut so you can't make the mistake. Presto!
3. Setup the Video Card
This is even more trivial than installing the RAM. Most of you should have an AGP based card. In that case, look for a brown slot on top of the majority white slots. There's your AGP slot, and all you gotta do is shove that video card in there. Make sure you remove the slot cover on the tower. Depending on whether you got a cheap tower or not, the task will vary in difficulty, and amount of force required. Also make sure the card fits snugly. If not, jiggle it up and down until it does.
If you have a PCI card, the procedure is the same, except you need to fit it into a PCI slot (duh). They're white slots and should occupy the majority of the motherboard. Pick the uppermost one for your video card. As before, make sure the slot cover on the tower is removed.