I’d spent days carefully weighing up the advantages and disadvantages and had finally decided that I was ready to take a first tentative step into the unknown: I was going to build my own computer. The old Cyrix P200 that I had been running was struggling to keep up with the increasing demands I made of it, the 4Gb hard drive was bursting at the seams and well, quite frankly, I wanted a new toy. I did consider buying a new PC ‘off the shelf’ but I was keen to get my hands dirty and anyway, suppliers never seem to install everything in quite way you want. I was also going to keep a lot of the hardware (CD writer, scanner, printer etc.) from my old machine and would need to install these things regardless of whether I bought my PC new or built one myself.

I started by scouring the pages of Micro Mart to find a suitable supplier and determine which components I needed to order. Firstly I selected the PII processor that appeared to give me the best value in terms of speed per pound. My Cyrix chip had never caused me any technical problems but it did have one drawback: whenever I telephoned technical support for any product the conversation would invariably go something like this:

Support: What make of processor are you running?

Me: Cyrix.

Support: Go away. I don’t want to be your friend anymore.

Well maybe they didn’t quite say that exactly but you get the general gist. The upshot was that I plumped for an Intel chip although I avoided the Intel Celeron range as I’d heard nasty rumours about them being somewhat slow.

I also opted for an Intel motherboard. There’s not much I have to say about motherboards. You need to make sure the one you choose has the right slot (or socket) for your processor and that it sports all the features you’re looking for. For example, I owned 3 ISA cards that I wanted to plug into my new computer so I had to make sure that the motherboard I bought had at least 3 ISA slots. The motherboard you choose will influence your choice of case (although I’m sure some vain people will pick a case first). So repeat after me: an ATX motherboard will require an ATX case, an AT motherboard will require an…well you get the picture.

From using my old computer I knew that memory could make a big difference to the apparent speed at which a machine runs. The reason is that if Windows fills up all your hardware memory then it starts using the hard drive instead. Since it takes up to a million times longer to access data on the hard drive you will notice your computer slowing right down whenever it needs to do this. The moral? A 500MHz processor with 16Mb of RAM will be slower than, well, a very slow thing on a relaxing day off: buy plenty of RAM!

The motherboard I chose had an AGP port and it seemed a shame to waste it. Since AGP ports are designed solely with graphics in mind they perform roughly ten times faster than PCI slots. Besides providing excellent general performance the Matrox Marvel G200 card that I purchased also allows the capture of full frame video. This has had the unfortunate side-effect of fuelling my wildest fantasies of becoming a multimillionaire Hollywood director.

There are loads of other things I bought, but most don’t need a lot said about them. Get the biggest hard drive, the fastest CDROM drive, etc, etc. One word of warning before moving on however is beware of forgetting obvious things like a fan for the processor and a floppy disk drive.

I placed my order and, after a few days of unbearable waiting, some large boxes arrived at my doorstep. It was like an IT fair lucky dip: I spent half an hour rummaging around amongst the polystyrene beads pulling out the parts of my new computer one by one. Once I had established that everything had arrived safely, the assembly process could begin.

I started by fixing the motherboard to the case and mounting the various drives. The settings for the jumper leads and the connection together of the memory, processor, drives and other bits and pieces was all explained very clearly in the stack of accompanying manuals. The thing that really amazed me was the care that all the different manufacturers had taken to make this incredible array of high technology interconnect. In no time at all it seemed I had put together all of the new hardware. I was truly shocked to find out how easy this had been. Before hand I had experienced nightmare visions of myself entangled in a never ending mess of wires without any means of escape. Nothing could have been further from the truth: putting the hardware together was very straightforward and reminiscent, in fact, of playing with Mechano or Lego as a child.

The final stage was to install the software. I must say that I approached this with a nagging fear that nothing would work and I would be forced to develop a cunning plan in order to get my money back. I plugged my creation into the mains power supply and to my enormous relief the screen flickered into life and I was welcomed by the DOS-prompt. There is a fair amount that you can configure at this stage by adjusting the BIOS settings, however exactly how and what you do will depend on your motherboard, see the ‘Are You BIOSed?’ sidebar for a few tips.

Before you can actually start installing software it’s useful to have a hard drive. Formatting was easy using the software supplied by the manufacturers of my drive. I had to download this software from the Internet, which was no problem for me, as I could use my old computer. This does however raise an important issue: A lot of resources are available on the Internet (see the ‘Resources on the Internet’ sidebar) or on the CDROMs supplied with the equipment however without a computer to access them they aren’t worth a sausage. If you are going to build a computer I would strongly recommend that you ensure you have access to another machine.

Finally I could peel the shrink-wrap off the gleaming Windows 98 box and attempt to install this infamous operating system. To my surprise the process was painless. I inserted the boot disk provided and from there onwards I simply followed the on-screen instructions. Naturally I took the time to perform a custom install to make sure I was only filling my precious hard drive with important files, such as the themes, games and screensavers. Up until this time I had been worried that I would have been unable to access my CDROM drive from DOS (see ‘The DOS Way of CDROMs’ sidebar) however the Windows installation took care of everything for me.

Now that I had the bare bones of a functioning PC I could start installing more software and try to get all my hardware working properly. This can be quite an intensive process and I wouldn’t recommend it to novices. If you’ve never messed about with settings in the device manager before then this isn’t going to be your cup of tea and you’ll probably find yourself needing some help. Indeed, when my soundcard started misbehaving, I got completely stuck and had to phone the technical support line. When I got through, a very helpful person identified the problem for me and talked me through the process of configuring the BIOS so that my soundcard would start doing as it was told. All in all the problem took less than an hour to sort out.

I’ve now been the proud owner of my self-built PC for a couple of months and during that time it has caused me no difficulties. One big advantage of the DIY approach is that you get a manual for all the parts of your computer together with accompanying utilities on disk (such as the DOS install program for the CDROM drive). It is not something I would recommend to someone buying their first computer and whether or not you save any money will depend on exactly what you buy and who you buy it from. However if you are a computer enthusiast but are scared that building a PC will turn out to be impossibly complicated then let me encourage you to have a go: if you can follow the recipes in your Grandmothers cook book then you should have no trouble building a PC!

If you’re anything like me you probably like to leave your BIOS settings alone. However despite this phobia I have discovered a few useful tricks…

The BIOS setup program is normally run by hitting the delete key as your computer boots up. One of the first things I did was enabled ‘Quick Boot’. This setting tells the BIOS program not to test more than the first megabyte of system memory and, since I had 128Mb installed, changing this setting made my computer boot up much more quickly.

Have you ever been irritated by the ‘Non system disk’ error message occurring at start up whenever you forgot to remove a floppy disk from drive A? The problem is that your computer tries to boot from your A drive. If there is no disk in drive A it tries the B drive and so on until it finds a drive that it can boot from. You can change this in the BIOS by altering the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd boot device settings.

Last but not least, I prefer ‘Num Lock’ to be on by default. This is one of those preferences that you would think could be set from Windows but does in fact require a quick trip into the wonderful land of BIOS.

The following web sites all have articles or tip sheets about building a PC:

If after all that you need some help deciding what hardware to choose try Tom’s Hardware Guide at http://sysdoc.pair.com/

Finally, if you find yourself getting annoyed with a Windows 95/98 problem then help is at hand: http://www.annoyances.org/

DOS just doesn’t seem to get on with CDROM drives in the same loving manner as Windows. Fortunately when I bought the CDROM drive for my new PC it came with an installation diskette that made it a simple process to get DOS and the drive talking again. So what do you do if you haven’t got an installation disk?

Firstly you will need to locate the DOS driver for your CDROM drive (it will be called CD.SYS or something similar). It’s probably worth copying this file to a floppy disk in case you suffer a total system failure. Assuming that the driver filename is C:\CD.SYS you will need to add the following line to your CONFIG.SYS file:

After this locate the MSCDEX.EXE file on your hard drive. If you find it in the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory then you would add this line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

If this leaves you baffled then don’t worry. Help is at hand in the form of Paul Butterwick’s excellent online guide to DOS and hardware troubleshooting. You will find it at http://www.butterwick0.freeserve.co.uk/index.html

For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with some of the acronyms I’ve used, here’s a summary. For a more comprehensive guide or if you simply want to baffle your friends check out http://www.access.digex.net/~ikind/babel.html

AGP Accelerated Graphics Port: An expansion card interface dedicated to graphics.

BIOS Basic Input/Output System: Even lower lever than DOS. This is built into the motherboard.

CDROM Compact Disk Read Only Memory: CDs used for storing data.

DOS Disk Operating System: All we had in the dark days before Windows were invented.

ISA Industry Standard Architecture: A type of expansion card interface.

PCI Peripheral Component Interface: A type of expansion card interface that is faster than ISA.

RAM Random Access Memory: Refers to read/write memory.