How I Went About Building My Own PC
The first part is the case (in my case it was an ATX tower case) which will house most if not all of the parts and a power supply about 450 amps or 550 amps. Most cases will come with one but request it anyway. The power supply is where you plug the PC to the wall and where every other part gets its power. The power supply is a metal square box with various plugs coming out of it which will soon be plugged into components within the PC case. I used four screws to attach the power supply to the back of the PC case at the upper top where there is a space for it.
The next part that I needed was the motherboard. There are a lot of motherboards out there. Some of the sites I used were TigerDirect.com and NewEgg.com to find out what motherboards were out there and what case can be used for each one. In my case I bought a Micro-ATX motherboard that will fit into my ATX case. ATX is the size and form of case. I screwed the motherboard onto the side of the case. I then attached the power supply to the motherboard via an electrical plug that fits snugly into the motherboard. Onto this motherboard I have the choice of what kind of processor chip will fit onto the motherboard.
The processor chip I selected to put onto my motherboard was an AMD Athlon XP processor chip at 2500+ processing speed. There is a slot on the motherboard where this fits. You have to be careful because the processor chip fits only one way and when it fits there is a rod that tightens the chip to the motherboard. For the processor chip there is a fan and heat sink that comes with the chip and this has to be attached with a substance that will transfer the heat from the chip to the heat sink so the chip will not become overheated. The fan will have an electrical wire that will attach to the appropriate spot on the motherboard.
The next parts that I placed into the case were the memory chips called RAM which stands for Random Access Memory. There are several kinds of RAM so make sure your motherboard can use or support the right type of RAM. I used two sticks of 512 MB (MegaBytes) or 1 GB (GigaByte) of RAM and placed them carefully into the two banks or slots where the memory fits onto the motherboard.
Now was the time to attach my different drives into the case and attach them to the power supply. I first slid my two hard drives into the slots allotted to them in the case and then attached IDE cables which are the cables that get my motherboard talking to the drives to the motherboard and back to the drives. My next drive was the CD/DVD Burner to be attached to the motherboard and this also was slid into its appropriate place in the case. I also added a floppy drive to my motherboard because I still have some floppy disks that I still use for gaming purposes. With all drives I had to attach the electrical wires/plugs that come out of the power supply to all of the drives so the drives would power up.
The next parts were the network card, sound card, and video card that were to be placed on the motherboard. The slots used for these cards are called PCI slots and they are gently pushed into these slots and they are screwed in at the top to attach also to the case so they do not get loose. The network card will be my talking connection for my DSL connection so I can go online. The sound card will have my external speakers attached to it so I can hear music or sounds. The video card will be attached to my monitor so I can see what I doing.
On the motherboard there were some settings and hook up wires for USB slots so I could use my USB Thumb drive to load or save if I needed to. I went ahead and activated these slots by attaching the wires to the motherboard.
So now I attach my monitor and mouse and keyboard and speakers and network cables and I am ready to put power to this thing of beauty. I place the power plug into the power supply and then into the wall. I press the power button and if I did everything right it will hum and come on and the monitor will come up and you are ready for the next step�..The setup of the OS or Operating System. Windows or Linux? That is another story!
