Fall Before me Machine OR Building my first PC

What an awesome experience this has been, for years, I have lurked around PC Building magazines such as Atomic
(which is by the way a pretty awesome Australian hardcore computing magazine)
But always thought that it would be too hard, but recently I took the plunge and very nearly proved myself right. Being a student and on a tight budget, that actually should never have stretched as far as it did I opted for a Gigabyte
GA-VM900M mother board, which while cheap is still pretty nasty.I also got a SATA hard drive and a SATA DVD combo drive a one 1 GIG stick of DDR2 667 ram and an Intel E6420 core 2 Duo processor.

It was the price of the core 2 duo that motivated me to build the thing in the first place, all that power for a mere $280, this is what Halo looks like on my starting to get old and never intended for gaming laptop, not too bad at all, but I think it will look so much nicer on the new system, of course having lost the product key I will probably never know, but eh there is more to life than gaming, at least that is how I sleep at night.

The installation seemed to go along quite well I bought a really cheap and really nasty case, because I could not afford anything else, and assembled my components, it was a lot of fun if you have not tried it and you are interested in computers, than give it a go, you won't be disappointed, there are heaps of tutorials online and I find that while Mikes Hardware
is getting old now, there is a dearth of information here and it can be really helpful if you encounter a problem.

On an old test PC that I was getting some practice on, I got an error about an 80 pin socket, I was like WTF googled it and stumbled upon this site that helped me, and straight away I was able to go and connect the hard drive properly.You definitely want to practice on an old machine before you touch the new stuff as just a little bit of tinkering around inside the box can really help to build up that confidence.Use your brain or fry yourself when you play with electricity the chioce is yours and I will not judge you one way or the other.


So I thought all was good I had everything assembled I powered on the system and there was just a beep, followed by a click click and another beep and still yet more click click's the CPU fan and the system Fan fired up but there was no signal going thru to the monitor, it was about then that I realised maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew.

After reading the troubleshooting forums at Atomic I thought that I had fried my mother board I also suspected that the shitty case that I had bought may not have had enough juice to power the machine, and a half dozen other theory's, that seemed to multiply with each post that I read.This was really frustrating but I knew (OK I desperately crossed my fingers and hoped) that if I waited to pay day, and stretched my budget a little further, bought a couple more components than maybe just maybe I would get this PC up and running.

So I had to wait a week, it was a long depressing week full of anxious moments where I would lie in bed wondering why oh why was I so concerned about a PC that would not boot, oh just take these thoughts of upgrades and trouble shooting forum images out of mind and let me sleep, no not dream about giant sized click click clicking computer components, sleep please just let me sleep, get out of my mind, oh hurry up pay day I can't stand that Useless PC lying in the corner looking at me laughing at me saying that it has defeated me, work you bastard, don't beep just work, why oh why won't you work.

But once payday finally arrived I went to the store and got a slightly better case, nearly bought another motherboard, but fortunately the techie said that it may be RAM so I bought a half GIG stick, threw it all in and you little rippa it booted up I was so happy to see that screen come up, I really was not expecting it to come up , as I still thought that the motherboard was fried, but she was alright, the machine booted Victory was mine machine nothing man oh mighty man ONE.Somewhere in between turning it on and off again, to test the old ram and make certain that it was the RAM before I returned it to the store, I noticed Smoke pouring out of the machine, Shock Horror petrified silence.


It was not actually too bad it was just some plastic melting, I had attached the front sound cable to the wrong connection, I kind of knew it was the wrong one, but I just wasn't thinking, it was the last cable Before I could test the machine, the week leading up to this moment had felt like a glacial age and so I just threw it in on the wrong slot, fortunately all it did was inconvenience me a little, because my headphones don't quite reach to the back Mic port too comfortably, still it could have been worse, my machine now worked, I was victorious, the clerk in the shop could not stand before me, the refund was mine and with a nice value for money graphics card, ah the sweet sweet pine of victory.

Being an IT student I got Vista for $5 dollars, so that I can test it out on this machine, but still mostly use my laptop for all of my important work (honestly I do important work).So far Vista has been a little frustrating I tried installing some antivirus software and Vista had a fit, but I do like the way that you can see files inside of folders, but I guess I may as well leave Vista for another post, thanks for sharing in my victory dance, one day I will figure out how to use my camera without flash, and then I will take some better photos, but these ones still look all right tech looks so Sexy.