First Boot
If you think you are ready, hit the power button. Hopefully nothing exploded.
If you see the boot screen and the system attempts to boot, you have successfully build your first computer! Note: You will eventually see an error screen (something like, “Invalid System Disk”) because you have not installed any software onto your hard drive yet, so there is nothing for the system to boot from. This is normal.
If something weird happens or nothing is displayed on the screen, either something was not installed properly or you have a hardware failure on your hands. Because Hardware Diagnostics can be a complex issue I won’t cover them here. I will, however, give you a link to the best troubleshooter I have found. This can be found at
PCGuide.com.
Configuring the BIOS
BIOS configuration is an area that I plan to cover in a future guide because it is a rather complex area of tweaking. Your best bet for your first installation of an Operating System is to click the option that says something related to "Load Defaults". There should also be an option to "Load Optimized Defaults" or something similar which you can load once you have successfully installed an Operating System.
The one option you should modify is the order of devices to boot from. This tells the computer which devices to rely on when booting up the system and the order in which to query them. Refer to your motherboard manual on how to do this because the procedure varies from mobo to mobo. You will want to make the CD-ROM drive to be the first device, the Floppy Drive to be the second and the Hard Drive to be the third. This will allow you to boot from a CD-ROM which most newer operating system discs can do.
Once you have done this, make sure you save your modifications before exiting.
Installing the Operating System (OS)
If you have a recent Operating System (including Windows 98 SE / ME / 2000 / XP and a number of recent *nix flavours), then you will probably be able to boot directly from the CD-ROM. Just place the OS CD in the Master CD-ROM drive and boot on your computer. The on-screen instructions should guide you through the installation process.
If all goes well and you can boot into your Operating System, then you have successfully built yourself a computer. If something went wrong, be sure to refer to the Troubleshooter at PCGuide.com.
To fully make sure you computer is running optimally, check out
Sandra, a benchmarking program. Run a few of the benchmarks several times over to stress the system a little. Even better, play a game or two (assuming you like 3D games which require a lot of resources and really stress a system).
And that’s it! Pretty simple, no? You now have the freedom to build your computers. But I must warn you: once word gets around, you will have people left and right asking you to build them a computer (friends, family, friends of friends, friends of family, etc…) which may be fun at first, and pretty cool if you don’t mind charging money, but after a while it stops being cool. What I am saying is, be careful with your new found skills!
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