Building Your Own Computer

[Bond]

I know a lot of these threads have already been made, but for the mindless and clueless... Have any of you built your own computer and if so was there a website you followed directions from or a book?

[Happydude]

yes, no, and no...

[Revival]

There already was a topic made on this: http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1102

[MasterMind]

I just built my computer about a month ago and I used mainly websites. Try www.pcmech.com. Its a very good site. Just make sure to do your research on what you actually want first.

[The_Dunadan]

i'm building my own pc this summer if i get enough money. my friends have and will help me. i'm too scared i'll mess up the new family pc and i'm sick of fighting over it with my siblings.

[Joeiss]

If I ever built my own PC, I am pretty sure that it would end up exploding me house.

[Cyrax9]

Yes I've Built one, No I didn't use a book, and No I didn't use a website, I had help at a Computer Camp, but I'll be doing it again this summer, with fresh-from-the-factory parts, instead of salvaged parts.

[The_Dunadan]

Originally posted by Cyrax9
Yes I've Built one, No I didn't use a book, and No I didn't use a website, I had help at a Computer Camp, but I'll be doing it again this summer, with fresh-from-the-factory parts, instead of salvaged parts.

where is this camp? what is it called?

[Joeiss]

It is called Joeiss' Camp for the Computer Illiterate. Please send your 1000 dblns fee to me! MUAHAHAHAHA.




back on track, this camp sounds cool. It probably isn't in Canada, though.

[Night Stormer]

When i've built my comp i went to www.falcon-nw.com. their comps are really great, if a bit expensive, but i just built it on their builder and got a local computer dude whos a friend of my dads build it and a $5000 US comp went down to 3500 cdn :D so i wuz quite happy bout that, but falcons comps are mainly gaming comps and are rated very highly.

[Cyrax9]

The Camp is Called "Computers & Kids" and is located in Pennigton New Jersey in the USA, it's a small place, and the fee is high, but it's a vey nice camp, and after getting a job their this year, and goign their for 10 years, I can safely say that almost everyone enjoys it, and their are some special events we have, such as visitors from the SETI (Search for extrateresrtrial inteeligance) leage, and we had the head of K'Nex come down from Canada last year, the Camp Owner's son works for the Toronto blue Jays, and created PockectDBA, a PDA with some cool feautres, I'm not sure what her other sone does, and her daughter is in the theatre. I can tell you this though, we still use aklot of DOS programming to teach begginers, and the yea we wanted to remove the TRS-80 computers, the kids went insane, so we still have them for games. The languages taught at the camp are QBasic, Visual Basic, Logo, and HTML, but we do spreadsheets and games as well.

[The_Dunadan]

Originally posted by Cyrax9
The Camp is Called "Computers & Kids" and is located in Pennigton New Jersey in the USA, it's a small place, and the fee is high, but it's a vey nice camp, and after getting a job their this year, and goign their for 10 years, I can safely say that almost everyone enjoys it, and their are some special events we have, such as visitors from the SETI (Search for extrateresrtrial inteeligance) leage, and we had the head of K'Nex come down from Canada last year, the Camp Owner's son works for the Toronto blue Jays, and created PockectDBA, a PDA with some cool feautres, I'm not sure what her other sone does, and her daughter is in the theatre. I can tell you this though, we still use aklot of DOS programming to teach begginers, and the yea we wanted to remove the TRS-80 computers, the kids went insane, so we still have them for games. The languages taught at the camp are QBasic, Visual Basic, Logo, and HTML, but we do spreadsheets and games as well.

i live in ohio:( oh, well. i'll build my own either way.

edit: 1100:roll:

[Cyrax9]

That's the downside Dunadan, the camp is a pretty local place, I met one person though, who went for a week and stayed with a family member. It's a nice place, I think we migfht finally get a Mac this year, We had one 8 years ago, but it was starting to die. If we get a Mac, I'll be happy as a clam.

My brother actually had his picture on a coupon for the camp in a local newspaper, I still have a copy from a few years ago. If we ever have something as interesting as the head of the SETI league come down from canada again, 'll be sure to telll yu guys about it.

[sdtPikachu]

Building your own computer isn't half as difficult as the OEM FUD will tell you, and it means that you get to avoid all the tedious crap the OEM's put on your comp before they ship it to you.

Anyone who's had the misfortune to use a craputer will know what I'm on about (ie cheap but well specced PC's such as from Compaq etc) that come bundled with all sorts of **** software (like ppp dialers that will only let you connect to certain ISP's instead of giving you a choice). All in all, you will have a much better idea of what your system is doing, it will save you money and you can build it you your exact specifications AND make it easily upgradable just by picking good core components.

I and my flatmate both want to make oursleves some nice computers. We both want a dual Athlon mobo with RAID support, some nice fast HD's and a bucketload of memory. Neither of us are concerned that much about graphics cards, so that'll be a big saving. I am also planning on making a low-spec computer (something like a 400 Mhz P2 or similar) to run as a dedicated Linux server box/firewall (ie it'll just be a box sitting in the bottom of a cupboard - no CRT or input devices needed) for the home network which will entail ethernet cables all over the place. Wahoo! Ah, I think I might be turning into an incurable geek.

Seriously though - if you can, build your own computer. All it really involves is screwing a few screws and connecting a few cables the right way, and loading your OS of choice (which you'll need to acquire CD's for - if you don't have say the WinXP - ugh - install disc [NOT the upgrade disc - this won't work unless you first install say Win98 an upgrade from that. I prefer clean installs myself] then you'll need something else.

Obviously, it's illegal to get the Win98 disc you got with your other computer and install it on a new one. So either break the law or run Linux :)

[quiet mike]

Well the upgrade disk is also a clean instalation. All you have to do is insert the XP with a clean drive, and it will ask you to put the 98 in just to see if you have a copy of the previous windows. I know people that did that and said that they had no problems with activation key or anything. I will have to do the same thing later this year.

By the way sdtPikachu, where cna I find a free linux OS to try it out. I am starting to know the Mac OS 9.2 at my school helping a teacher, but I want to see how Linux works. I have no programing experience. I'm looking into a new PC and I heard that a SCSI HDD operated by Linux is much better than IDE.

[sdtPikachu]

Originally posted by quiet mike
By the way sdtPikachu, where cna I find a free linux OS to try it out. I am starting to know the Mac OS 9.2 at my school helping a teacher, but I want to see how Linux works. I have no programing experience. I'm looking into a new PC and I heard that a SCSI HDD operated by Linux is much better than IDE.

Technically, all Linux distibutions are free, you just pay for the cost of burning the CD's or havig them burnt for you. My distribution of Mandrake 8.2 cost me £9 and with that I can run a full blown Unix interface, web server, the works...

Some distros cost more for various reasons. Some are bundled with non-GPL software, meaning it has to be paid for (an example is Sun's Star Office or the Mandrake 8.1 gaming edition which comes bundled with The Sims). The boxed distibutions you will see in computer stores priced at about £40 are more expensive because they contain extensive manuals etc, as well as (perhaps) some of the non-free software.

You can find Linux distributions all over the place; my flatmate bought a £20 book "The Redhat Bible" that came with Redhat 6, and if you've got the time and patience you can even download the disc images to your PC and burn them onto CD. Just pop 'em in your CD drive, boot from them and bingo - you're into the install.

Linux is a very sharp change from windows, which is all I've ever really used... some brief flirtations with apple, but nothing spectacular. One thing you need to know about Linux: it's not as easy to use as windows, not by a long chalk, but it will let you do far more stuff.

You're right about the SCSI thing with Linux; Unix based OS's write to the hard drive ("swap file") much more than Windows does, hence anything that reduces this time, such as SCSI, gives a significant performance increase. Conversely, Unix systems use far less processing power and much less RAM than windows does.

The standard for cheap high-load servers on the net is a box (usually intel - typically a 500 MHz P3 or thereabout) running a Linux distro (usually redhat) with a gig or so of RAM (servers need lots of RAM to remain fast); this configuration would more than adequately serve a desktop (obvously, you don't need the gig of RAM!). I've seen Linux running on 386's, and Linux with Xwindows (i.e. Linux's primary GUI) running on 486's. It'll slow down if you do fancy graphical whizz bangs, but it'll still run.

If you're thinking about SCSI, remember it's expensive; HDD's are typically three times the price of an average IDE drive. Personally, if you're only wanting to tinker with it, a standard IDE configuration will do you fine, although if you want the best speed obviously SCSI rules! Though like cyrax says, it can get hot.

Oh what, you have no programming experience? Oh well, Linux is not for you. Haha, only joking. No, I have no programming experience either; Linux has of late been designed for the average idiot to be able to install it and do stuff. The tricky parts are basically just understanding how *nix handles things - you'll need to learn what terms such as mounting and the like mean - and secondly the use of the terminal.

The terminal is to Linux what DOS used to be to windows. It's a command line interface (not entirely unlike DOS for that matter) which you can use to do things with your system that the software can't (which isn't alot actually), but the terminal will let you do and see things that aren't included/shown in the GUI.

First time I used the terminal, I didn't have a clue what i was doing (having never used DOS or read any of the documentation), but it's all a matter of remembering a few simple commands. For instance:

sdtpikachu: su
password: <enter root passwor>
home: cd downloads
downloads: tar xvjf program.tar.gz
:extracting files:
downloads cd programfolder
program folder: ./configure
:compiling code:
program folder: make
program folder: make install

All looks very confusing I know, so I'll talk you through it.
Call up the terminal and you start off in your /home directory. You then type in the "su" command to change user. You are then given a password prompt, upon which I enter the root password (in case you don't know, root is the *nix term for system administrator). I remain in the home directory, but now have the rights to install software. I then use the "cd downloads" to go to the downloads folder (which was made earlier and had a few files put in it). I know there is a program package in here called program.tar.gz (.tar shows that the file is a "tarball" and contains many small filesm whilst .gz shows the file has been compressed by gzip). I then type "tar xvjf program.tar.gz" to do several things: the tar command shows there's a tarball there (I think), the x extracts the files, the v... umm... I can't remember what the v does... the j uncompresses/unzips the files using gzip, and f creates a folder to put them in.

I then cd into the folder that was just made (which is now full of the uncompressed source code), and with ./configure I compile the code. "make" and "make istall" will install the files to the bin (for binaries) folders.

I know it all sounds hellish, but at any time you can type --help to be given a list of options over what to do - context sensitive too!

If you want to give Linux a try, I would recommend the Mandrake or SuSE distributions; these are the two that concentrate hardest on making the OS as easy to install and us as possible. Installing my version of mandrake coudn't have been simpler (even the "expert install" was a breeze), it will automatically detect almost all hardware mounted (there are some exotic hardware confugrations that Linux has trouble with, mainly due to manafacturers not releasing the drivers for their hardware to the linux developers).

Some words of advice: if you can, partition your hard drives BEFORE installing Linux as the Linux partitioners don't tend to be as intuitive or forgiving as programs like partition magic. And as always, make sure you defrag before partitioning anything! I partitioned my C drive in two with PM before installing Linux on it as well (and then reformatted the Linux file system to ReiserFS, which doesn't need defregging, at install) and put another partition on my G drive, a 500 MB swap file.

Installing it is easy, using the graphical environments is easy (I recommend GNOME - KDE is too much like Windows, and runs slower), getting to know the system isn't, but be assured that once you do there'll be nothing you can't do, mwah ha hah! Remember that setting up your owen server will be exactly like setting up one of the internets several million Linux servers (Linux servers running Apache and the like make up an estimated 61% of the total - it's cheap/free, and more capable than Microsofts efforts). For me, starting to learn Linux has been very rewarding, and I've learnt a helluva lot about how computers work.

Anyway, here's some links to keep you busy:

http://www.linux.org/info/images/officialpenguin.gif
Tux, the Linux Penguin

SuSE homepage (http://www.suse.com/index_us.html)

Mandrake homepage (http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/)

Surprise everyone. Surprise yourself. Surprise Bill Gates. (http://www.linux.org/)

Hope I haven't scared you off!