Tips for builders

Pull power plug from the back of the PSU before you start inserting\removing stuff.

ALWAYS read all the documentation and manuals that come with your components BEFORE you start - Especially true if it is your first time building a PC.

If you are confused by anything, then go online and find the answer, or ask someone that knows.

Double check everything you've done - BEFORE you apply any electrical power to your PC.

NEVER double post unless your name is phantasm.

Never buy online? You would have to be about crazy to not buy online. You can find lots of better deals at places in your area but most parts are better off bought online. For instance, you won't find an Enermax PSU in your area, nor a quality PSU at all. At least, not in most areas, unless of course you live near one of these online stores such as FrozenCPU.

Things like CDR's (drives AND disks), keyboard, mouse, speakers, and other items like this I prefer to always buy from places such as OfficeMax. OfficeMax has great rebates (just make sure you fill out the form correctly) that will save you lots of money. In most cases I have dealt with OfficeMax buying these types of things, the prices they had after rebate (sometimes even before) were the same or less than the prices online that were already very cheap. A good example of this is a Network Interface Card I bought not long ago. It was about $9 and was also $9 online for the exact same NIC, but online you must figure in shipping so OfficeMax is the better route.

If your able to buy online then do it. Just use common sense about where to buy, do lots of research, and what do buy online and what not to buy online.

If your not in the market for exceptional quality speakers then OfficeMax has speakers for about $35 with subwoofers, such as Altec Lansing. These specific speakers that I bought are very very loud and powerful, and for $35 that is a good deal, but I wasnt in the market (at the time) for 5.1 speakers or anything like that so it was the best choice for me.

If you want to sample some very good PC speakers then I suggest visiting Best Buy. They have a large selection and some VERY nice speakers, that not only look great but sound very good.
If you dont find what you want there then online will be the place to go (unless you know of somewhere else to look in your area).


As ALWAYS research IS your FRIEND. I research for 4 months usually before I even begin buying the parts for a new PC. After those 4 months I have looked at over 1000 different websites reading up on technical aspects of computer components, reviewing prices, making comparisons, checking out those websites on resellerratings.com, speaking to fellow techies about my choice for parts and getting opinions. After those 4 months, I have a PC that just can't be beat for the price that I spend for it (at the time -- I'm sure 2 months later you could have a nicer PC, at the rate that prices flucuate these days and technology changes).

Don't you mean don't quadrupal post? No.. more like wait... 10 posts in a row?

Oh boy I'm turning into Phant, I just posted two in a row!


Hehehehe J/K Phant


:grinthumb

One that I didnt realize untill a year later...

If you mother board and hard drive both support (say) ATA100, make sure the ribbon cable connecting the 2 supports ATA100.

If it only supports up to ATA33 (like mine did), your hard drive is only going to run at ATA33 :dead:

How can I check what ATA my Hd's are running at?

You can do this one of muliple ways. First, you can reference your motherboard manual to see which ATA standard your chipset supports. Then, if you know the manufacturer for your hard drive, the model number of it, (can be found in the BIOS) or the manual, you can either reference the manual that came with your disk to see what the highest ATA mode it will run at, or you can goto the website of the maufacturer and do the same thing. No matter the device, the computer will use the lower ATA value if the standards arent the same. (eg. if you have a ATA33 motherboard, and a ATA100 hard disk, the drive will run at ATA33 speeds)
This is the universal way to check, but some BIOS screens have a short system summary of the basic devices in the system during the boot process. It lasts only a few seconds, if at all on some systems, so I dont recommend you depend on this to determine the ATA standard you are using, use the mentioned method above.

to fry your cpu thats what....

to build your perfect pc you must live and breathe technology, you must not stop researching keep up to date and Never get anything generic NEVER

LONG LIVE AMD AND ATI

AMD and ATI are a good combo. Intel is expensive; well AMD top stuff is expensive; any top stuff cost $. but best bang would be a AMD, lets say 2500+ or an INTEL 4C 2.4GHz. Thats just what I think anyways.

Stay away from generic or no-name PSUs (Power Supply Units).

Too many times have power supplies been advertised as 400W (should power just about anything), and they can't get the computer to start with the video card plugged in only.

Let me give you a name of a PSU that gave me trouble--EVER. Don't use their PSUs, they suck.

Spend a little bit more that goes a long way.

Good brands are Enermax (inexpensive, and good quality), and Antec (which is a tad expensive but good quality).

Don't use too much thermal grease/compound, you want it to conduct to the metal heatsink, not become its own.

I would like to stress something, because of my carelessness I suffered the consequences.

Turn off the computer AND unplug it from the outlet before doing anything! Even if you are installing a fan, TURN IT OFF.

Me, and my carelessness, I was working on a computer last weekend, and was connecting a fan to a computer that was on. For some o-so strange reason, it appeared the molex conector from the PSU was cut off. I'm thinking what the heck? So I go ahead, and strip the wires (while the computer is still on). When I began to twist a couple wires together, I touch the second wire. SHOCK! ZAP! SMOKE! Computer restarts. Luckily, the computer was fine, I wasn't really.

After being in shock, litterally and bodily state, I looked at my fingers. They were burned very severly deep, and had wire marks. It hurt alot like being burned, to this day I still have a scar on two of my fingers.


SO THE LESSON IS: TURN OFF THE POWER AND DISCONNECT THE COMPUTER BEFORE WORKING ON IT!!! I can't stress it enough.

You don't need to learn from your own mistakes, you can learn from others!

Also, it's a good idea to remember to not install "accessory drives" when installing Windows XP and formatting for the most part. You can, and probably will, get drive letter confusion, and the computer would get kind of messed up on some programs that think there's only such thing as a drive C. It's uncorrectable if your hard drive letter becomes something other than C. You cannot fix it.

So, when formating, disconnect all "accessory drives" (e.g. Zip Drive, Flash Panels, etc.) and leave your CD ROM drives and a floppy in. Just to be sure, I would only have the hard drive(s), 1 floppy, and 1 cddrive, and after the install, just add your others on.

This is a tip that will save you from an extra format. It's time saving if something were to get mixed up. It only takes less than 1 minute to disconnect your "accessory drives". Spending one minute to be sure that you won't have to format and install an OS for two hours, and then install applications for another hour, and all kinds of goodies, leading up to probably a day.

I'm not saying you are guaranteed to have a problem if you don't follow this. It actually depends. Take that extra minute to only have minimals when you format.

One minute goes a long way.

I wouldn't normally say this, but since this thread is used as reference to alot of people (4300+ views) I have to sort of intercede here...
I have 5 hard drives (12 partitions) and 2 CD-ROM drives, and I format, remove, repartition and generally change them fairly frequently. Every single program I've ever used has recognized all of them, I even store as many savegames as I can on my M: drive and run a few programs (like SETIDriver) off my J: drive. I've installed tons of OS's (XP, 2000, 2003 Server, RH9, Fedora, Slackware, etc.) with the only hitch of several of them not supporting my RAID controller. Plus leaving your components in makes it so that their drivers are installed during installation, and not via the Add Hardware wizard later. If every time I installed a new OS I unplugged every other hard drive, that would be the epitome of inefficiency and a nightmare of retardedness, because anyone with a little common sense knows how to dual boot. We're not teaching our grandmothers how to build a computer, but maybe I am wrong and everything does need to be rounded down to the lowest common denominator. I assumed people who were bold enough to build a computer weren't like that, but I guess not. Maybe some people do have these problems :dead:
All I'm saying is that removing all your "extraneous" drives isn't necessary and is just too much of a hassle to be worth it. But if you want to because you're paranoid and freak out even though absolutely nothing is going to happen, go ahead, I'm just saying it's nonsensical.

And it's perfectly alright to install just a fan when your machine is running, just not to...heh...strip the wires and proceed to touch them...:rolleyes:

Your hard drives and CDROM drives aren't what I mean by "ACCESSORY DRIVES"

That's not what I mean by accessory drives. Sure.. you should be fine with things windows will obviously recognize... cd drives... hard drives... etc.

But, I found that when installing the OS... at least for Windows... and a Zip Drive is connected, it sometimes likes to label the Zip Drive as the C... I've done it over a few times and it happened each time on an install of Windows XP Pro SP1a OEM.

By "Accessory drives" I am talking about stuff other than hard drives and CD ROM drives. I just happened to take it to a further extent in explaining that maybe it's best to remove all of them... just to be sure.

Yes, I've installed my OS plenty of times with 2HDs... or just 1... or add 1... 2 CDROMS... etc.

It's stuff like Zip drives that will knock you off the cliff.

Zip drives should be labeled as B:, but having 2 floppy drives would screw that up. I can see how that would happen. But who has two floppy drives? I don't even have a single one.

Not necessarily. I was instaling a setup:

SATA HD on chan 0
CDROM drv on primary master
zip drive secondary master
floppy drive... on its own channel

And it decided to make my zip drive C:, my HD E: CDROM D: and Floppy A:.

Best advice I can give is to ask questions and TAKE YOUR TIME!!!!!

If it won't turn on the first time, check the pawer switch lead to the mobd. It may be backwards. Also if power/disk lites won't come on it may be the same thing.

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