Swear to God..., It went Down like this..........And Believe Me... I'm No Expert...
I came home from center city about 3:00PM, had coffee, went to the super market and bought bread and milk. So now it' maybe 4:45PM. Another cup of liquid productivity, and I decided it was time to throw some parts I collected together and call it a computer.
So, pop the faceplate off the case, jamb in the DVD burner, mount the HDD in the cage, locate and arrange everything else, then nuke a chicken pot pie for dinner, chow down real quick, and get back to it.
Mount the CPU and heat sink, pop in 2 sticks of RAM, and then install the board in the case. Scratch my head some more while I try to get the PSU wires routed. Finish up with the IDE and SATA cables, and make sure the case front wires are on the headers correctly. Get some more Coca-Cola.
Now I hook up an old Emachine keyboard, and ball wired mouse. Pull the monitor from another box, plug it in, then light up the surge suppressor. Hit the power switch, the fans go on, the machine posts and polls the system, but stalls with a boot error. Makes sense, since there's no operating system. Cycle the DVD tray, pop in a copy of Ubuntu 7.10, and hit enter, then accept the first menu choice it gives, (it's already highlighted, run live or install), and hit enter again. Three minutes after that and it's trying to run a live session of Ubuntu, and I'm feeling really feeling good about myself. It's only 10:15PM now and I type about 5 words a minute. (The HDD had been wiped and would have needed to be formatted before continuing. But, it's getting treated to a new copy of XP Home, so the format and install of Linux would have been pointless).
Granted this was a very simple build, it's far from finished, and I have a couple of them under my belt, but the process is fool proof, at least if you're not really a fool.
To top it off, the machine is pretty much exactly what I wanted.