HOW TO BUILD A COMPUTER 101
Date: 10/8/00
By: Rice
Installing Windows and the rest of the hardware:
I forgot whether or not you need to reboot after formatting, so just do it just in case. Probably not though. Anyways, make sure you got your Windows (legit or otherwise) CD in the CD-ROM drive, and that you can switch to it by typing "D:" in the command prompt. If you made multiple partitions, your CD-ROM drive is just the letter after the last partition. "E:" for two partitions, "F:" for three partitions, etc...
Type "SETUP" at the command prompt, and the CD should whirl up and enter the Windows setup program. I can stop yakking here, as most things should be self explanatory. Enter your CD-key, customize the crap you want to install, and sit back for approximately half an hour while Windows installs itself for you. You may have noted that your computer consists of nothing more than the K-ssentials, the video card, and the 3 drives. The reason is that Windows's plug and play is a lot more like plug and pray, although it has evolved quite a bit since the original Win95.
If everything goes well, half an hour later, you should be sitting pretty at the windows desktop along with a bunch of junk icons like "Install MSN". Here's a short digression. Once, while helping a friend installing his friend's computer, we encountered a strange problem. Whenever we tried to install windows, we'd get inconsistent errors ranging from Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) to a downright hard crash. We kept rebooting and tweaking with the BIOS and jumpers, but nothing was giving way. Finally, somehow we miraculously got to the windows desktop, but whenever we got there, we kept crashing no matter what. The final culprit? We took out the CPU, and found out the thermal grease was applied inappropriately. The CPU was overheating, and thus crashing randomly. After remedying that fact, all was well.
Here's another strange error that occurred to me while installing Windows once. After entering the CD-key, I kept encountering the same error over and over again. It said something conflicted with my PIDGEN.DLL file. Weirdest thing I ever saw. I swore I entered the key correctly too. After a while, I gave up and headed over to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. My answer lied in a simple fix: it turned out that the date on my system was light years off track! Fixing the year from 2032 or something back to 1999 remedied everything. The moral of these stories is that errors can come out of the most unexpected places, and double checking every step along the way is crucial to a successful first bootup. Also, Microsoft has a handy Knowledge Base that has solutions to even the weirdest problems. Windows has tens of thousands of bugs (no joke!), and most of them are documented in there. Use it wisely. =)
Back to the task at hand. The first thing you'll want to do is install brand new, up-to-date video card drivers. Right now, you're rendered in 640x480 16-colors graphics hell. Bust out your video card CD before your eyes start to bleed, and pop it into the CD-ROM drive to update the drivers. Things should happen automatically once you got the CD in, but in case it doesn't, right click a blank spot on the desktop, choose properties, go to settings --> advanced --> adapter --> change. Choose "Specify A Location", "Have Disk..." and point to your CD. Things should flow smoothly thereon out.
Now, for the sound card, network card, and modem, I recommend installing one at a time. Conflicts are a lot easier avoided this way, plus diagnostics in case of problems are more apparent as well. Make sure you got the driver CD's for all of 'em next to you. Pop open your case and install one of the cards first, doesn't matter which. Find an empty slot for that particular card, remove the slot cover on the tower, and plop that sucker in there. Make sure your computer is powered down first! Now, power up your computer again, and windows should detect it and ask for the drivers. Point Windows to the CD where the drivers are, and presto! If it's the soundcard, play around with it and test to see if the sound works, etc. Then shut it back down, and lather, rinse, and repeat for the rest of your hardware. Should you run into any errors, consult the respective manual for detailed directions.
Note: When installing the sound card, you might find a little wire with two ends on it. This is to connect the sound card to the CD-ROM, so you can listen to music CD's on your speakers. Plug one end into the sound card, and the other end into the CD-ROM. That's all you need to do. =)
P.S. Another good source of troubleshooting information is Deja.com's Usenet forum. Just punch in keywords to your problems and you should see a listing of people that had the same problem, and hopefully, people with solutions for them. For example, I had a hell of a time trying to get my Aureal based soundcard to work on an i815 based motherboard. Visiting Deja.com gave me the answer immediately.
Final notes:
I can scarcely believe that I have reached the end to this monster article. I will never undertake such a Herculean task ever again (just kidding! I love you guys! =P). Believe it or not, I still have a gazillion things to say, but I'll never get this baby published if I yak on forever. As of now, I have reached page 20 in Microsoft Word. If I worked this hard on my school papers, I'd have a GPA I'd feel much better about.
Given, this is a condensed guide to buying and putting together a system yourself for the first time. There are a lot more potential problems I have not addressed, especially when setting up hardware in Windows. That alone has given me more nightmares than Chucky from Child's Play (Yeah, I'm a pansy. I'm terrified of a walking, talking, homicidal doll. So sue me). Chances are, you'll encounter frustrations. Please do not hesitate to ask me, or any body in the message board. We all have had our first times (no pun intended), so we can sympathize.
The road may not be smooth, but with the vast amount of help and support available, it might as well be. Confidence is the #1 key in building a system for the first time, and although you may be denounced by your friends and colleagues as geeky, you know they're envious of your accomplishment. Have fun with your new system... and your new found knowledge and experience! =)
... OMG ... I'm actually done!! <*Sounds of celebration trailing off*>