of computer stuff and zzzzzzzz.....

Anyway, after I got my stuff prepared I went on to the next step, the actual build.

First step is to open up the casing and install the power supply unit (PSU). There should be 4 screws that comes with the power supply and corresponding 4 screw holes on the casing. The location is usually (in most tower casing) at the top back of the casing. Align the power supply and screw in the PSU.

Next is the motherboard installation. Before you do that, it is a good idea to ground yourself by wearing a groundstrap or have your one part of your body in contact with the metal part of the casing when handling the electronic components and boards.

Before installing the motherboard, there’s the thing on the back plate. Because different motherboards have different jacks and ports placement, you might need to change the back plate on the casing with the one that matches your motherboard. The corresponding backplate should comes together with your motherboard.

If you have got your standard sized mother board there should have corresponding screwholes/mountings on the casing. The standard normally used for mother boars is ATX. So if your motherboard is an ATX size, then your casing should be one that can fit in ATX motherboards. But don’t get too hung up on it, most motherboards and casings are ATX sized (except for those mini ones)

Mounts on the casing:

For ATX motherboards, there should be ~9 holes for you to mount onto the casing. Locate the holes and align them to the mounts on the casing (on mine I mount on 8 holes). Then screw away.
Mounted Motherboard:

After you have mounted the motherboard, you can plug in the cables to the motherboard.
Power cables: there is a 24 pins power socket on the mother board, look for a 24 pins plug ( or 20pins and a 4 pins plug on some PSU) on your power supply and plug it in. It can only go one way, so you will not make the mistake of plugging it the wrong way. An important thing to note is that some mother boards comes with 20 pins socket, so check which one is yours.

Sockets on the motherboard:

Power plugs from PSU:

Then plug in the On/off switch, reset switch and HDD lights wires to the motherboard. You need to refer to the motherboard manual to find the location of the pins to plug into. Check your manual if there are any other wires to be plugged in. Sometimes there are chasis intrusion, or other LED signals that you may wanna plug in.

Next is the Graphic card.
Before installing the graphic card, check what slot that it uses (meaning what standard slot if goes into). Then locate the slot on your motherboard (through your manual). Remove the corresponding metal plate on the casing so that the plate on your graphic card has a hole to slot in into. Slot in the graphic card and screw the plate into the casing. (tip: sometimes it needs a bit of force to push the card in into the slot, so you can push in from one end and then ease in the other end.)

Slot for the graphic card and metal plate removedGraphic card installed:

If you have other cards to be installed, use the same method to slot the card in.

Next, you install the RAM. This is fairly simple, locate the DIMM socket on the mother board and unlock the two locking mechanism on either side of the slots. Take the RAM modules and slot them in. Note that there is a notch on the RAM module to prevent you from slotting in the wrong way, so if you find that you cannot clot it in, probably you have slotted in on the wrong end.

RAM slots with the locks opened

RAM installed in the slots.

Next is the hardisk.
Before begin installing, there are 2 common types of connection for hardisk, SATA and IDE. I got a SATA hardisk because it is faster, so I am going to show based on SATA Connection.

Before connecting the cables, firstly check on where the hardisk bay is on your casing, then find out how the hardisk is mounted. Different casing have different type of mounting the hardisk, most older ones still use 4 screws on the sides of the hardisk while newer casings use tooless mount. If possible practice mounting first. The reason is simple, if you are not familiar with mounting the hardisk and accidently yank the hardisk with cables attached to the motherboard, it will not be a pretty sight.

Then plug in the signal cable (SATA cable in my case) on the hardisk. (For IDE Hardisk, it’s basically the same except the connection is through a IDE cable that looks like a thick ribbon) Next Plug in the power cable (from the PSU) to the hardisk.

SATA port on the hardisk

Power and SATA cables connected

After doing so, mount the hardisk into it’s bay on the casing.
(some people may prefer to mount the hardisk first before plugging in the cable, but I prefer plugging is first as the space in the casing is tight and my big hands have difficulties squeezing in to plug in the small cables)

Then plug in the other end of the SATA cable to the motherboard.

Finally, the processor itself.

Locate the socket for the processor on your motherboard and open the clamp door. There is a cover that protects the connection of the socket. Remove that cover.

Socket for the processor (LGA775) with the clamp door open:

The processor in the socket (note the notches and the triangle):

Then take the processor and align it to the socket. There should be a small gold triangle on one of the corners on the processor and notches on two opposite sides. Align these to the socket on the motherboard and place the processor. There is only 1 way that it can go in so if the processor does not fit properly, probably it is not aligned or orientated to the correct sides. Once aligned and fitted in, close the clamp door.

Because the processor generates a lot of heat when it is working, it comes with a heat sink that helps it dissipate the heat. To install the heatsink, just align the 4 pins on the heatsing to the corresponding mounts on the mother board and press them it. The mount should go in with a snap. Then connect the fan cable from the heat sink to the motherboard.

By now the installation is pretty much done and you can do some wire management before closing the casing. Some casing comes with additional fans to circulate the air, connect the fans to the powercables from the poser supply.

Then just connect the keyboard, mouse and display and you have your own built PC.

But before it can be truly useful you will need to install the operating system and softwares. Those will come later.

of computer and some not so good explanations...

Continuation from the previous post. If you would like to build your own pc but do not know where to start or know very little of how to go about buying the right stuff (or what stuff to buy for that matter), I will try to explain a bit here on what I have learned through this experience. Mind you that I started with very little knowledge but through researching in the web (forums, product websites and wiki) and talking to people, I have learned enough that the task is not too daunting and that the average person with some common sense can do too.
Here’s a simplified version of what I know about computers. (disclaimer: wifey yawned when I tried to explain so if you find this boring, it’s ok to skip to *)

A computer basically is a glorified information processing machine, give it the right input and it will process to give you the output.

The input device can be keyboards, mouse, scanner, etc and Out put devices can be display, printer etc.
So it’s pretty evident that the main thing to think about when you talk about a PC id that ‘box’ and what’s inside it.

The heart of that ‘box’ is the processor which jog is obvious to process. In a way you can say that the processor is the brain (the processing part) that does all the processing of information. But then a brain cannot exist or live by itself, it needs something to sit on, in order to interface with the outside world (Input and output devices). The thing that the processor sits on is called the mother board (Or main board). In similar ways the motherboard can be considered to be like the body where the processor (brain) sits in. It connects the processor to the other devices: hardisk, cd rom, keyboard, mouse, display, scanner, printer etc. All these devise are connected and integrated through the mother board.

The processor by itself cannot do everything on it’s own, so there are other parts that help it. The graphic card helps the processor to process the graphic and information to be displayed. This portion is usually cone in a separate graphic card (Circuit board) although some motherboard incorporate this function.
Then there is the part that stores the information, something like the part of our brain that remembers things, this is the hardisk. So that’s why the larger the hardisk, the more information that can be stored. But there is one thing about the hardisk. When the processor wants something, it will say to the hardisk “ Oi Hardisk, get me this and that information” then the hardisk will spin and spin to look for the information and this will take some time. Since the processor is an impatient guy, it will say “Apa lah, how come so long one” and like any char koay teow guy when you ask if your order ir ready or not, the hardisk will say “on the way, on the way”. This obviously will put a strain on the relationship between the processor and hardisk (actually not really lah, but basically this will slow down the whole system) this is where RAM comes in. RAM or random access memory will go and get the address of the information (and some information) that is commonly used by the processor when the computer starts up. So when the processor wants something, RAM have already got it ready. That’s why, the bigger the RAM capacity the better (but you also have to consider your system la. Getting big big ram but not being used also no point because the slowness is not limited to RAM oredi)

Then there is also those things called SATA, IDE, PCIE, USB etc. those are basically standard connections and languages used between the devices to the computer/motherboard. Different standards have different advantages and uses and since it changes, I think it’s best to research thru wiki.

So basically that’s it. Short explanation, maybe not entirely correct because this is based on what I know, so if there are any geeks out there who notices any mistakes do leave a comment so that I can correct it.

of boxes and some geeky stuff...

I had the opportunity to purchase Intel microprocessor on a discounted price recently. Since the current PC that I am using is already pretty old, I thought that I should just grab this chance to build my own PC.
To start off, here’s my build:
Processor: I got the Core 2 Duo E6600 as this is the one that I think gave me the best value to performance based on the discounted price that I got.
Motherboard: I chose the Asus P5B-E plus as it is capable to go for quad core if I need to in the future and also it has surround sound audio out and optical audio out, but most importantly is it within my price range.
Hardisk is standard western digital 250 gig
Graphic card: Asus EN8500GT which is the lowest end 8000 series graphic card. Based on what I know/heard the Nvidia 8000 series runs direct x 10 which is what vista is optimized for. Another point for me is that it has digital signal out and also TV (HD capable) signal out which means that if I get a TV that has a DVI in, I can hook it up to the computer. Something interesting happened when I bought the graphic card but that’s another story.
Memory: 2 gig Kingston DDR2 667 RAM. Initially I wanted to get 800 RAMs but the guy who promised to get them for me did not come thru, and since it was the only thing that I still did not have for the build (plus the fact that it was hard to find 800 rams in penang and even if there is, their price were insanely high) , I went for the 667 instead.
Casing: I got the Raidmax smilidon casing. I used to think that casing was not really that important and can just get a cheap one, but after going thru this build, I kinda realize that having a good casing can make a bit of difference. I has a sidepaned that flip down that east the mother board and cards installation and also it looked cool.
Display: Dell had the 22” wide screen on offer at a low price recently so I quickly grabbed it. And not a moment too soon because the week or so after, the price went up by RM100.
Keyboard and mouse: I got another good deal on this one. Recently Microsoft had this wireless mouse and keyboard set on 50% discount. It was so hot that all the shops that I went to in penang were sold out the day after the ad came out. Fortunately a colleague called me from KL and asked me if I have anything to buy from KL (he knew I was building a PC) and I asked him to get the stuff for me.

Here are some links for references:
motherboard: http://my.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=307&l4=0&model=1399&modelmenu=1
graphic card: http://my.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&l2=6&l3=515&l4=0&model=1644&modelmenu=1
processor: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/index.htm
casing: http://www.raidmax.com/specs/smilodon.htm
keyboards and mouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=057
Poser supply: http://www1.coolermaster.com/index.php?LT=english&Language_s=2&url_place=product&p_serial=RP-650-PCAR&other_title=RP-650-PCAReXtreme%20Power%20650W

so here are some of the boxes that i started with: